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Nanotechnology: Small science is changing our world
Last Updated October 20, 2006
CBC News
From laptop computers and golf clubs to stain-free pants and anti-bacterial socks, microscopic engineered particles are present in hundreds of products.
And there are many more coming. Researchers from the United States and Hong Kong have tested a nanogel that stops bleeding quickly. Canadian scientists have made a single electrically charged atom act like a transistor, which opens the door to the next stage in miniature electronics.
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These products have a common thread: they all involve nanotechnology (Latin for "dwarf technology"), the making or manipulating of tiny particles such as atoms and molecules on the scale of a nanometre — one-billionth of a metre. (The socks contain silver nanoparticles, the seller says, and silver has anti-bacterial qualities.)
Anything less than 100 nanometres is considered a nanomaterial. A sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometres thick.
While nanotech is still in its early stages, it's "poised to have a major impact, not only on science, but also on society and human well-being," Canada's National Research Council says. The council said the manipulation of microscopic materials "is opening up vast new horizons in virtually all sectors of the economy."
Links to nanotech websites
Imagine tiny machines that could travel through the body, destroying cancer cells as they find them.
Or engineered materials that greatly improve the efficiency of fuel cells and molecular machines designed for specific purposes.
The prospects for radical changes range through manufacturing, medicine, information technology, computing — and just about any other field where smaller devices and processes might be useful.
Commercial markets for nanoproducts could reach $1.5 trillion per year in as little as a decade, the Edmonton-based National Institute for Nanotechnology suggests.
Imagine NanoLego
Ralph Merkle, a computing professor at Georgia Tech College, uses an analogy based on Lego blocks to explain the benefits of nano manufacturing. While rearranging the atoms in coal produces diamonds, manufacturing today is very crude at the molecular level, he said.
"Casting, grinding, milling and even lithography move atoms in great thundering statistical herds. It's like trying to make things out of Lego blocks with boxing gloves on your hands," Merkle said.
"Yes, you can push the Lego blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can't really snap them together the way you'd like."
Nanotechnology, he predicts on his website, "will let us take off the boxing gloves."
Nanomaterials' behavior unknown
But there is a downside, critics say. The big worry is the lack of understanding about how nanoparticles behave.
Take a common material like gold. As a visible mass, it is yellow and inert. But a particle one nanometre across is blue and reacts mildly. At three nanometres, it's reddish and acts like a catalyst.
With that kind of change, "how do we assess such a tremendous difference in property?" said Delara Karkan of Health Canada at a 2006 U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conference studying regulatory approaches to nanotechnology.
In fact, Health Canada approved a nanotechnology-based drug for metastatic breast cancer, called Abraxane, in June 2006.
"Health Canada does not currently have any triggers that define a nanoproduct for regulation," the government said in announcing the approval, adding that the company didn't draw attention to the nanotech nature of the product.
Stronger protection for consumers urged
U.S. critics fear the lack of rules is allowing all kinds of unknown and potentially harmful products into the hands of consumers.
"Unfortunately, so far the U.S. government has acted as a cheerleader and not as a regulator," Kathy Jo Wetter of the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration said at the 2006 FDA meeting.
And the U.S. Consumers Union wants nanoproducts treated like any other new chemical, urging that they be throughly tested before they are unleashed on buyers.
But defenders say there's no evidence of harm, urging that the FDA leave the commercial developers to their business while continuing to monitor the situation.
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