Nanoclast

It seems the world of nanotechnology has been preoccupied with the notion of “pubic engagement” lately. But until now the calls for its use have mostly centered around concerns about whether there are any risks associated with its use in myriad products.

My issues with this exercise I have noted before on a number of occasions on this blog, which range from the cynical idea that they serve mainly as a public relations stunt to the dangerous thought that the mob is suddenly in charge of deciding the direction of science. So I started to get nervous when I saw this latest plea to the public coming from the White House for the public’s input on how nanotechnology can best be applied to create the biggest economic benefit to society.

You see the White House has determined that nanotechnology is one side of a Golden Triangle of technologies that additionally includes Information Technology and Biotechnology. Two members of the President’s Council on Science and Technology (PCAST), namely Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and Shirley Ann Jackson, decided that it would be a good idea to get the public’s input on how these three areas of science and technology could best be leveraged.

I am mainly interested on how this will work. Will it be based on call-in votes? So, if a majority chooses alternative energy applications over say cosmetics will government funding only go to developing nanotechnology applications for solar panels? Should be interesting.

You don’t have to be a bystander either. You can participate by going to the OpenPCAST website where you can contribute your ideas. Also, on Tuesday, June 22^nd from 10:00AM to 2:30PM (that’s tomorrow and I assume based on Eastern Time) you can watch the Webcast from the PCAST website.

What is odd about this is that applications for nanotechnology that deliver the greatest economic benefit are not going to be determined by call-in votes like some kind of twist on “American Idol”. They will result from a need being addressed in the marketplace by a company that has found a way to deliver it in a way that provides them with a profit.

I suppose this seems like a good idea to somebody at PCAST and I can imagine the positive spin it got in some committee meeting with words like: “Empowerment”, “Democratic” and “Public Engagement”.

But let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment, what on earth is this going to accomplish? If PCAST is really worried about how its Golden Triangle is going to generate economic benefit maybe they should take a look at the models currently at work for innovation and developing technology and have a rethink on that issue.

It seems that ever since the term nanotechnology started getting bandied about in the field of electronics people have been forewarning of the eventual death of the complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS). At a recent IEEE Nanotechnology Symposium meeting, Dr. Hans Stork’s, VP and CTO Applied Materials is reported as suggesting that CMOS will remain the backbone of the electronics industry and he is not really expecting a “post-CMOS” world.

He seems to be right. So far, attempts to work outside of the CMOS paradigm are ultimately met with assimilation: “Resistance is futile” to quote a Star-Trek Borg. At least one example of this might be Zettacore, which started out as trying to replace silicon with molecular memory technology, and instead ended up making its business focus improving semiconductor manufacturing.

But forever is a long time and while CMOS has things tied up until at least 32-nm dimensions, and possibly until 22 nm and 16 nm as well, it may need some new functional materials and hybrid platforms to continue its ever-downward push.

The latest to come down the pike comes from the researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN), which I had the privilege of getting a tour of a few years back.

The IBN researchers, who originally reported their work in the Institute of Physics journal Nanotechnology, have developed a direct-write fabrication process that negates the need for lithography for producing discrete field-effect transistors. The process employs an electron beam or ion beam to scan over a sample in the presence of a precursor gas that results in material to be deposited directly onto the sample with nanomater resolutions.

According to an article in Nanowerk, one of the researchers, Somenath Roy, sees that this method is better for rapid prototyping than lithography-based techniques.

“Our single-step fabrication technique obviates the time-consuming and labor-intensive lithography process, and enhances the fabrication accuracy and yield," says Roy. "With a higher level of precision and throughput, it can offer a powerful method for rapid prototyping of futuristic nanoelectronic circuits."

Well, yeah, I guess it might be better than lithography techniques for prototyping but what about full-scale production? Roy suggests in the Nanowerk article that with “further optimization” the direct-write process could eventually lead to scalable nanoscale integrate circuit fabrication. Just remember, forever is a long time.

Last week, I commented upon Dr. Andrew Maynard’s questioning of the Friends of the Earth’s (FoE) call for a ban on nanoparticles in sunscreens.

Dr. Maynard, who has a reputation for someone who challenges the safety of products containing nanoparticles, turned the tables somewhat and challenged the FoE to answer a fairly specific question: What is your worst case estimate of the human health risk from titanium dioxide and/or zinc oxide nanoparticles in sunscreens?

Not to be outdone in a PR spectacle, which is their bailiwick after all, the FoE has responded. And the answers are really none too surprising, they follow along the lines of “You know we don’t know that, so why are you asking and why aren’t you asking the manufacturers instead.”

The prose is so plaintive you can almost hear the high-pitched whining. But as the FoE should know Maynard has been challenging manufacturers about the safety of their products for years now, but he has decided to do it responsibly.

The FoE on the other hand doesn’t seem to feel that constraint. Instead on occasion they have behaved like a petulant child by boycotting public-engagement meetings intended to get the input of the ordinary citizen. The offered reason for the boycott being that the meetings were PR spectacles (again an area that the FoE knows very well) with foregone conclusions. It couldn’t have possibly been that engaging the public in a discussion about the safety and risks of nanoparticles may have taken away their ability to drive the direction of the discussion?

I was so pleased to read the one comment posted thus far on the 20/20 blog post from the always sensible Hilary Sutcliffe.

Here is the final paragraph from her comment:

Andrew regularly raises some of the very issues that you mention in your list in different fora and in his blog. But in this regard I think it is quite appropriate that your work should be the focus of just as much scrutiny as he puts everyone else’s and so welcomed his expert view on your paper. NGOs make an important contribution to this and other debates, but there has been a tendency in recent years for data to be cherry-picked and skewed to make a point, which for me undermines the credibility of a much needed countervailing voice in this discussion. NGOs like yourselves play an essential role in furthering debate in this area, but your views and agenda also deserve to be debated and dissected as any other interest group’s does, whether it be business, government, consumer groups, scientists, social scientists or any other. Only then is society and consumers served. Sadly what has happened is that nobody dare challenge NGOs and they are not able to contribute as fully as they might, so we often don’t get the quality of information and debate which is really needed.

I have worked for the last six years at a European-based company where much of its work has been in consulting on nanotechnology. As an American in these circumstances I have come into contact with what at times has seemed to be the bewildering sensibilities of the European bureaucrat.

I am not altogether sure what the difference is between US bureaucrats and their European brethren, but one can sense something is amiss when comparing the two.

That said, Michael Berger at Nanowerk provides us some insights into the European variety this week as he looks at what seems to be the endless cycle of pointless reports and road mapping sessions that EU seems to generate without ever seeming to notice they already have published a half dozen of these previously. This odd habit of always starting from scratch in these road mapping exercises seems to be one practiced in the UK as well. 

Berger’s editorial started it, and now we have Tim Harper at TNTLog not only amusingly adding anecdotes to support Berger’s view, but also commenting on the latest call from Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to ban nanotechnology. 

I have commented previously here on the sometimes bizarre positions of MEPs on nanotechnology and concluded that it may amount to nothing more than some grandstanding.

But this latest report from Chemistry World seems to indicate that the MEPs have targeted “nanosilver” and “long multiwalled carbon nanotubes” to be banned in electrical and electronic products.

For someone like myself that has spent more than 5 minutes looking at this it gets a bit frustrating to have to explain over and over again that the threat to human health of nanoparticles, such as carbon nanotubes, only exists when the particles are not part of a material matrix. So, I'm glad the Chemistry World article brings in some quotes to explain this...again.

As I have pointed out before, by following this labeling logic we will have to label every laptop with a laundry list of toxic chemicals that went into its production. I understand the need to appear as though you are listening to the concerns of ill--informed NGOs, but I always thought it was the role of our elected officials to rise above, even if it's just by a little bit, the ranks of the angry mob.

One of the biggest obstacles for nanotechnology has been the nearly relentless hype that surrounds it. There are things to be excited about now that we have a better idea of what happens at the nanoscale and how we can manipulate it. But that understanding and capability does not and never will constitute an industry.

After seeing this latest press release that touts a “nanotechnology industry”, my spirits sank.

I was further kicked while I was down with the list of “major trends” that would impact this so-called nanotechnology industry. It ran the range from “Where-have-you-been-the-last 10 years” trend that cited: “Nanotechnology holds the key to the ultradense digital memory” to the “What-on-earth-are-you-talking-about” trend that predicts: “Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) ready to spread nanotechnology applications.”

While this kind of nonsense may sell some reports, at this point it no longer attracts financing and really only results in giving ill-informed NGOs fodder for their tirades about an out-of-control “nanotechnology industry”.

We are even given a video to go along with the press release. It contains the typical definitions of nanotech (with the awkward relating of the etymology of ‘nano’), a brief history of nanotech and its application areas. 

One of the interesting bits about the video is the US-centric bent given to the history of nanotech. We get Feynman’s “Room at the Bottom” lecture and Smalley’s co-discovery of the buckyball (albeit with the omission of Kroto from mention in that discovery). But as for the rest of the nanotech pioneers they don’t quite measure up.

The fascinating part though would have to be that this video could have been made in those heady days 10 years ago when the NNI was being launched when former cheerleaders for valuing companies that consisted of kids with laptops at billions of dollars  decided to turn their investment expertise to nanotechnology: “The Next Big Thing.” Sigh.

I was reading with bemusement the latest expression of self-righteous indignation from an organic food organization banning “nanotechnology” from organic food and I was considering blogging on the absurdity of it all when I realized TNTLog had already reduced it to its silly posturing last month.

I thought I would also take a look over at 20/20 Science to see if this latest insult to our collective intelligence had been discussed and instead came across Dr. Andrew Maynard’s measured but ultimately devastating analysis of the Friends of Earth (FoE) latest screed on nanoparticles in sunscreens.

I would like for a moment to relate how I first came to know Dr. Maynard in the hope of illustrating just how open he is to the questioning and the estimating of nanotechnology’s risk. I was organizing a conference to be held at the Georgia Tech Research Institute back in 2006 on the topic of nanotechnologies’ applications in the food industry, and one of the speakers I invited was Dr. Maynard.

After all the conferences he has participated in I am fairly certain he has little to no recollection of this event, but I remember he spent a good portion of the two-day conference challenging his colleagues on really how sure they were that they had adequately addressed nanotechnology’s risks.

So, from first-hand and in-person experience I can testify that Dr. Maynard will challenge anyone on this issue. This to me makes his careful analysis, which manages to take apart card-by-card the house-of-cards argument of the FoE, all the more devastating.

Just when I begin to despair that hyperbole, misdirection, or manipulation of data around nanotechnology’s risk  will win out over careful analysis, I am comforted by a piece that sets out to carefully measure each charge and see where the truth or the fiction lies.

In a recent blog entry, while complaining about the woefully slow pace of replacing the internal combustion engine with an alternative that might does us more good than harm, I referenced a recent white paper “Sustainable Technologies for the Next Decade” published by Cientifica in which it is explained that the battery technology that is targeted for a powering automobiles drains our dwindling reserves of rare minerals that are 90% controlled by China.

No sooner do I read and learn of this rather dangerous predicament than I read in the New York Times that China is planning to tighten controls on those rare minerals.

You have to hand it to China. They manage to frame their announcement of putting the squeeze on the rest of the world in such a way that it appears to be a sincere attempt to remediate some of the environmental damage they’ve done to their land from the mining of the minerals. Now that’s chutzpah.

It couldn’t possibly be an attempt to maintain pricing during a worldwide economic crisis that has at least temporarily slowed demand for everything, including rare earths? Nah.

Nonetheless, the hope is that the rest of the world will see this as a wake up call and realize that rare minerals are…well, rare. And they are controlled by a country that has recognized as a long-term strategy since at least as far back as the early 1980s that these rare earths are as important for its interests as oil has been for the Middle East.

By “wake up call” I mean an alarm that it's time to start looking for solutions. The Cientifica White Paper suggests that nanotechnology could offer these solutions:

“Through the use of nanotechnologies we can now start to develop processes that do not use rare resources, for example using carbon nanotubes and metallic nanoparticles in polymers to make them conducting rather than applying thin layers of indium tin oxide.”

That is certainly an example. However, the means by which the Cientifica paper suggests we can extend the list of examples for replacing rare earths remains a point of contention I have with it. The paper suggests, “Instead of extracting and purifying ores we can now start to think about what properties an ideal material for a specific application might be and begin to design one.”

While this comes close to the “material by design” idea that I have railed against in the past as being so far beyond our capabilities in terms of computing capacity and even understanding of physics that it can’t be considered to be possible within a timeframe that can be predicted, the paper hedges with:

“We should be clear here that the holy grail of ‘materials by design’ is some way outside the investment horizon for most institutions, but there is a half way house already available, by combining new and old materials, nanotubes and polymers for example, to create something more suitable than traditional materials.”

In any case, this is a research direction that acutely needs to be addressed, and as we’re beginning to realize we will not get technologies that help us in the way that we need unless we focus specifically on developing them.

I was really struck by a headline that has been circulating around nanotech websites since yesterday: “Nanotechnology Needs Big Facilities".

I was taken aback by the notion that what nanotechnology’s development has lacked over the last 10 years of large government investment is the building of large new facilities. From my perspective, it has been almost exclusively the construction industries around the world that have gained the most from all this government largesse.

A nice twist of irony to go along with my incredulity is that these sentiments were delivered in Barcelona, Spain at the first International Congress on Nanotechnology and Research Infrastructures.

Spain as the setting for this proclamation strikes me as ironic since Spain is in the midst of a economic crisis that has been in part created by construction companies building housing that no one could buy or occupy: speculative construction without an underlying economy to support the result. This strikes me as not being too different than International Iberian Nanotech Laboratory located in Braga, Portugal that is a joint facility shared by Spain and Portugal.

In that case, you have two countries that a year before the construction of this 30-million-Euros facility ranked at the absolute bottom of per capita spending on nanotech, according to a report from the European Commission entitled “Towards a European Strategy for Nanotechnology”. With its 4 cents per person spent on Nanotech, Spain invested 1.6 million Euros in nanotech in 2004. The following year they announced that they were going to be investing 15 million Euros in a facility.

After nearly starving research and researchers of basic funding that would pay salaries or get needed lab equipment, the government decides to increase funding by nearly 10 times the level of the year before. But for what? A new building? I supposed it’s easier for all parties involved to turn to their shiny new building as a product of tax dollars rather than inconclusive work in advanced materials to create better batteries, for instance.

But in fairness, the headlines in their efforts to play on the words “nanotechnology” and “big” (I want to add this phenomenon to Bill Maher’s list of “New Rules”: No more puns on nanotechnology and size) managed to miss the message which is not “bigger” facilities but “sharing” the facilities that already exist more efficiently.

According to Carlo Rizzuto, head of Italy’s Elettra synchrotron and chair of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), the aim should be integrating all the existing facilities in a network, allowing scientists from different fields of biology, chemistry, physics, engineering and others to work together. 

But this idea of sharing, which is so critical to the advancement of science, is almost anathema to nationalistic aims that fuels so much government nanotech funding. So all of these huge government investments that are supposed to put one country or region ahead of all the others is almost diametrically opposed to the sharing of these facilities. The rub will be that the nanotechnology advancements that these various governments are seeking will not come about through this race to put your region ahead of all the others but sharing your facilities with all the others.

When graphene was first reported just six years ago one of the knocks against it was that it was difficult to produce in sufficient quantities to have a significant impact on commercial applications.

But now researchers from Rice University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed a new method for producing bulk quantities of graphene.

The researchers work has been published in the Journal Nature Nanotechnology and has demonstrated how the common industrial solvent chlorosulphonic acid can be used on graphite so that individual layers in the graphite peeled away spontaneously.

According to the lead co-author of the Nature article, Matteo Pasquali, Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Chemistry at Rice University, this method produces a very pure material while employing the bulk fluid-processing techniques commonly used by the chemical industry.

The process produced two grams of graphene per liter of acid, which is a result that is about 10 times more concentrated than existing methods. With these concentrated solutions, the researchers were able to make transparent films that were electrically conductive.

By improving the production yield for graphene and being able to make transparent films from the results, the researchers see applications brightening for graphene in areas ranging from less expensive touch screens on smart phones to creating fibers that could strengthen composite materials.

My open question last month on whether nanotechnology could offer some solutions to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has received a few suggestions on how it could be used and some named products.

However, it seems that one nanoparticle-based solution developed by Stamford, Conn-based Green Earth Technologies has run afoul of a group of scientists  who have petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency through a letter not to allow the use of the product as a dispersant in the Gulf.

I suppose it’s not a coincidence that I came to know of the story from a piece written by the investigative journalist, Andrew Schneider. You may recall my review of Mr. Schneider’s work in which I discuss his amplification (shall we call it) of some research that has indicated how some carbon nanotubes mimic the pathogenic effects of asbestos in causing lung damage.

Now please note the research is far from conclusive, is not about all nanoparticles only carbon nanotubes because of their length and at that only involves some carbon nanotubes.

With this in mind, Schneider manages to get a frustrated quote from Dr. Michael Harbut, an occupational medicine specialist who is concerned about the health of clean up workers, who says: “As does asbestos, nanoparticles have been shown to cause an aggressive cancer called mesothelioma,"

No, it hasn’t been shown that it causes mesothelioma. First, the research is only about carbon nanotubes, not nanoparticles. And the research has only shown that some carbon nanotubes can cause the same pathological effects as asbestos, namely because the CNTs are so long the phacocytes are not able to engulf them entirely so in response they release a toxin that doesn’t effect the fiber but harms the surrounding tissue. It ‘s called frustrated phacocytosis.

I really can’t find fault with Dr. Harbut here. Instead Mr. Schneider from his previous work seems to be building a case that nanoaparticles cause cancer so he found someone with a title in front of their name that could provide a quote with the words “cancer” and “nanoparticles” in the same sentence. Again, playing a bit fast and loose with terminology manages to make the story more sensational, but cheats us of getting a better idea of what the real risks are.

Now as to the efficacy or dangers of the dispersant, I have to concur that it has not been tested. But it seems that the studies on the 118 oil-controlling products that have been approved for use by the EPA are lacking in some details as well. These chemicals were approved so long ago in some cases that the EPA has not been able to verify the accuracy of their toxicity data, and so far BP has dropped over a million gallons of this stuff into the Gulf.

I get it, I really do. Let’s determine the toxicity of a product, I’m all for that. But to continue to make all nanoparticles some kind of toxic monolith foisted upon the unsuspecting public by greedy capitalists might build the reputations of investigative journalists but leaves the rest of us out in the cold.