Last week saw a little bit more bad publicity for the nascent nano industry, in the shape of a news report from the BBC highlighting a call from the Royal Society for industry to disclose the data from its safety testing of free nanoparticles in consumer products. The origin of the report was a press release from the Royal Society, quoting Ann Dowling, the chair of the Royal Society/Royal Academy of Engineering study of nanotechnology.
The pretext for the Royal Society press release was the recent publication of an inventory of consumer products using nanotechnology by the Woodrow Wilson Centre Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies. But this call for disclosure was already one of the recommendations in the Royal Society’s report, and it’s not hard to sense the growing frustration within the Royal Society that, two years on from the publication of that report, we’re not much further forward in implementing many of its recommendations.
Richard, the frustration is understandable, but the problem is that, at present, no one has responsibility for implementing the recommendations. Until then everything is voluntary with no agreed standards.