Q&A

Dr. Teague is the Director of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, which supports the planning, budget, and assessment activities of the Nanoscale Science, Engineering, and Technology Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council. The NNCO also serves as the point of contact on Federal nanotechnology activities for government organizations, academia, industry, professional societies, foreign organizations, and others.

The environmental and societal impact of nanotechnology has been much discussed in the media. How has the NNCO been addressing these issues? What are some of the risks of working on the nanoscale?

It is true that concerns have recently been raised in particular about the environmental and health issues relating to nanotechnology. In terms of what the NNCO has been doing to address these issues, we have certainly been doing our best to act in behalf of the Initiative and in behalf of the subcommittee to try to communicate to the public, first of all, the degree to which the Federal government has responded to the concerns that have been raised about the potential health and environmental risks that could be posed by particular nanoscale materials or nanotechnology-based products. On the nano.gov Web site, we recently posted a list of all of the research that is underway to address these concerns. Overall, through the NNCO and on behalf of the subcommittee and the Initiative, we’ve been trying to communicate to the public, to the press, and to the associated scientific and engineering communities, the large degree of work that is indeed ongoing to investigate and to determine if there are real risks associated with the use of nanoscale materials and to understand what risks there might be if a human is exposed to the nanoscale materials or what potentially could happen in terms of the impact on the environment with the introduction of new nanoscale materials.
I think it is important to recognize that the research being done covers a broad spectrum of different types of research, such as fundamental and basic research to understand the ways in which nanoscale materials may interact down at the cell level, in tissue, and within the body. At this stage, research is sometimes just for obtaining new knowledge about a specific type of interaction. For example, one does not know if the basic research will result in information that might lead to a new means of treating cancer or if it may shed light on how toxic a material might be to a cell or to human tissue. So, much of the research being conducted ranges from this type of basic research all the way to research that is targeted specifically at trying to understand the toxicology of a specific nanoscale material. For instance, as a part of the National Toxicology Program, within the Department of Health and Human Services, a program was begun over a year ago to look at the potential toxicity of dermal exposure to titanium dioxide and any potential inhalation exposure to nanotubes and other nanoscale materials. The fundamental cell-level work would be conducted at either the National Institutes of Health or some of the projects within the NSF, the DOE, or within the Department of Defense (DOD). I think it is very important to realize that in understanding the risks we try to look at the whole spectrum of research from basic research to targeted research focused in specific areas.
Currently, the risk of working with nanoscale materials is still an active area of investigation. I think the research to understand the risks of nanoscale materials is commensurate with the research that is underway to utilize the technology for economic benefit, and for overall improvement of the quality of life. I certainly believe that the benefits of the technology outweigh the potential risks that we now expect from working at the nanoscale.
When addressing this issue of environmental and health implications of nanotechnology, a very important perspective is to realize that materials with nanometer dimensions are not new to our environment. One need only look at the current nanoscale materials that have been around for a long time: paint pigments have had nanoscale materials incorporated in them for many years; carbon black, used to improve the wear-resistance in tires, has been around for a long time; and particles emitted from diesel engines and almost any kind of conventional combustion process contain nanoscale materials. I think it is important to realize that these kinds of particle – at least these dimensions of particles – have been in the environment for many years.
What is new is that we now have nano-engineered particles at this scale. (We are now realizing that even some of these have been in the environment as outputs from combustion processes.) These are the materials that we are trying to ensure that we do adequate research on so that we understand the unique properties resulting from their nanometer-scale size.