ROUNDTABLE
Although there is a lot of buzz around nanotechnology, there are currently few concrete examples, and theories as to its potential effects abound. In this roundtable discussion, MPMN editors spoke with experts about this cutting-edge technology. This session's participants include Mansoor Amiji, PhD, associate professor and codirector of the Nanomedicine Education and Research Consortium at Northeastern University; Christine Peterson, founder and vice president, public policy for the Foresight Nanotech Institute; and Chris Phoenix, director of research for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.
People speculate that nanotechnology may do everything from cure cancer to create apocalyptic weapons of mass destruction. How much of this is feasible and how much is a product of imaginations run wild?
Phoenix : I would say that very little of it is imaginations run wild, as long as you realize that it will happen at different times and that not everything that could happen is guaranteed to happen.
Amiji : Clearly there is some tremendous benefit from prevention, diagnosis, and therapy of cancer that nanotechnology brings forth. There are also some issues that we will have to address. The main thing to really keep in mind is that information is going to be the key here, and decisions will be made based on scientific information that comes forth.
Peterson : In order to think clearly about these questions, you need to think about time frames. In the near term, there are certainly exciting medical applications; but, they are relatively modest compared to what we can expect in the mid term when we start to see some very exciting developments in terms of diagnosing and treating cancer. The National Cancer Institute has set a goal to end suffering and death from cancer by 2015, which is a very ambitious goal. But evidently they are pretty excited over there; I think a lot of the reason is because of nanotechnology. When you look even beyond that, there are even more dramatic applications. That is when you get into the potentially abusive applications that are mentioned. I would agree with Chris Phoenix that this list is not necessarily a list of things that are products of imaginations run wild, as long as you focus clearly on the time frames.
The National Cancer Institute announced its goal of relieving suffering and death caused by cancer by 2015. How plausible is this goal?
Peterson : I would say that to eliminate it 100% is perhaps going too far. We have a whole world full of folks who get cancer, but by 2015 it is quite possible that we would have highly effective cancer therapies based on nanotechnology. I hope that they would have been pushed through the regulatory process, perhaps on a fast-track basis, to try to get them out on the marketplace.
Amiji : I agree completely. I think it is a plausible goal, but I think we have to make certain clear definitions here. One of the things that Andrew von Eschenbach talks about is how to make cancer a chronic disease that we can manage. I do not know if a cure is going to be the key phrase here; but rather, how to make cancer so that it is a manageable disease and is something we can treat. Or maybe reduce the occurrence and then treat those that we are able to treat. In terms of curing cancer 100%, that is probably not realistic by 2015.
How will nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing alter the way in which we currently develop products? Will the lab be the new manufacturing floor?
Phoenix : Molecular manufacturing is expected to make fully automated encapsulated manufacturing devices. They would have to be automated because, when using the productivity of nanosystems, they cannot be controlled individually by direct human control. Once you automate a device, then you won't have professionals controlling it, but users. You do not have to be a professional to operate an ink-jet printer or even a printing press nowadays. I would say that not the lab, but the tabletop will be the manufacturing floor.
Peterson : It is true that the lab, at some point, will be the new manufacturing floor. But the goal, as Chris points out, is in the longer term: to bring these things out to the consumer in order to actually manufacture items on site where they are going to be used. This will eliminate huge transportation costs and the accompanying environmental damage. It will still be engineers developing products, but the people building them, once they're fully automated, will presumably be the consumers.
Phoenix : There are different kinds of product development. For example, a lot of software is developed under practices that simply would not fly in most other kinds of engineering. You do not ship an alpha version of a highway overpass and if it collapses, rebuild it. For products that are easy to rebuild if the current one is not satisfactory, their design could be more like software engineering than like any kind of mechanical or hardware engineering that we are familiar with today. We could see a much more rapid development of such products similar to the way that Web applications flowered as soon as the World Wide Web came along. Again, that does not apply to all products. It does not apply to safety critical products, such as cars and medical devices. Those would require more traditional engineering. But I would think that lightweight consumer products could be developed very fast and very experimentally once we get programmable general-purpose nano-based rapid prototyping.
Will nanotechnology require different materials than traditional manufacturing? If so, what materials will be in demand?
Amiji : I will begin with the health perspective, specifically focusing on biomedical nanotechnology. We clearly will have to have different materials. There will be some issues specifically about materials—biological interface—and what kind of interactions those materials will induce or not induce. There are some efforts already on the way to design materials specifically for biomedical applications based on combinatorial synthesis approach and high throughput testing.
Peterson : Nanotechnology will require new and different materials. In some cases, over the longer term, we will see a continuation of the transition that we have already begun: moving away from using so much metal. We can expect that change to continue because we are finding that carbon-based materials in nanotechnology are very strong and very lightweight. This will hopefully mean that we will have to mine less metal, which should, in theory, help the environment. In the very long term, we would hope to get the carbon that we need from the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so we could combine mining carbon from the atmosphere with cleaning up the CO 2. So it is a win-win there; it could be a very different world.
Phoenix : Looking in the post productive-nanosystems time frame, it will be possible to build nanostructures that are engineered to perform all kinds of functions. When you have programmable molecular shapes, you can use one material–probably carbon lattice–to build sensors, motors, and computational systems. There will be less need for exotic materials when you can design functionality rather than having to use material properties. But when we can build engineered structures that perform engineering functions, programmable function coming from programmable structure coming from flexible manufacturing of carbon lattice, then we will be able to do a whole bunch of things with just one material in many shapes.
In addition to battling cancer, what health-related advancements could emerge from nanotechnology?
Amiji : Cancer is highlighted because of the NCI efforts. But I want to mention that the NIH has a much broader nanomedicine effort, which is outside of the NCI and is more focused on other institutes within NIH. I have served on many panels from other institutes, such as the National Institute of Heart, Lung, and Blood Diseases, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, all of which have an interest in nanotechnology. The main thing that we are seeing in terms of nanomedical applications is crossing biological barriers, that is, trying to get a targeted delivery of agents to specific sites in the body, as well as the development of novel imaging agents. These transcend many different diseases, not just cancer. There are applications in cardiovascular health; there are applications in infectious diseases as well. So there is quite a broad opportunity list here, not just for cancer, but clearly in areas like infectious disease where you want to identify the pathogen early on and detect it. Especially when you are trying to detect it in very complex and diluted systems, trying to be very sensitive in your detection. Nanotechnology clearly has a role to play.
Peterson : Apart from cancer, they are already trying to use technology for biocompatible materials for implants. I believe there is also a nanotube-based implant in development that measures blood sugar for the control of diabetes. At the recent Foresight Conference, I interviewed a researcher from Israel who is going to try to produce an implant in the mid-range time frame that could actually produce insulin inside the body so that you do not just monitor the diabetes; you actually treat it. In the longer term, as Mansoor was pointing out, there aren't really any boundaries around what medical problems nanotechnology could be deployed for. Once we reach the more advanced medical nanosystems, it really becomes quite difficult to identify a medical problem that an advanced medical nanosystem could not identify, treat, and cure.
Phoenix : Short term, we could have cellular-scale sensors for research and for diagnosis, microsurgical tools, medical materials, and a range of research tools that we are already seeing news stories about. Middle term, we would see more disposable and implanted sensors, with which you can check your health every day, or even every hour. Also, we could see more wide-array sensors like DNA and protein chips that scan for literally tens of thousands of different materials in parallel. With that much sensing capacity, we could search every day for anything unusual in an entire population. When you can monitor everyone's health on an ongoing basis, it will be a lot easier to deal with infectious diseases, to catch new ones early, and to know who to isolate and who to treat. Long term, with rapid prototyping of products, research tools could advance very quickly, diagnostic tools could advance as soon as they are verified, and even therapeutic tools might not be too far behind.
There is a lot of talk about various nanodevices that will perform tests inside the body to improve health. How do we know that they are biocompatible, safe, and nontoxic?
Amiji : The issue of biocompatibility or safety of the product is really one of the most important challenges that we will have to address in developing nanotechnology for health applications and other areas where not only the consumers, but also the workers in this area, will be exposed. You will start to see a lot of effort in this area from various toxicologists who are looking at the safety issues of nanoparticles, whether it is with carbon nanoparticles or some other type of nanoparticle. The scientific data is really what is going to determine how these materials are performing. One of the ways to at least partially address some concern is something that we are doing in my lab, which is to focus on some of the biocompatible materials as starting points and look at what is already known about the safety issues of these materials. Then, see how we can develop and exploit the nanostructures out of these materials for biomedical applications.
Peterson : In terms of how we will know that various medical nanodevices will be safe for the patient, all of these things are going to obviously have to go through the same old standard procedures that we have been using for medical devices and pharmaceuticals now for quite a while. The procedures that we have in place, although not perfect, work pretty well for the patients over time. As Mansoor mentioned, in this case we also have to look at the workers who are producing these products and make sure that they also are safe. The whole regulatory community that deals with worker safety is starting to have to grapple with this question of how you regulate nanoparticles that may have potential issues. That is an area of active debate and is gaining a lot of attention right now. On the upside, at least it is getting that attention. The consumer can feel relatively happy that, compared to previous innovations, we are getting an earlier start on this issue.
What regulations will have to be enacted in order to keep nanotechnology safe? What effect will they have on the medical and manufacturing industries?
Peterson : Again, we have to talk about time frame. In the near term, there is a lot of discussion about whether the EPA or OSHA needs to have greater authority–or certainly greater budget– in order to evaluate the safety of nanoparticles in the workplace, in products, and at the end of life cycles, for when products are in landfills. In the longer term, when we go beyond simple nanomaterials and through the mid term of nanodevices all the way to advanced nanosystems, then you start to see applications beyond medicine, conceivably in weapons, for example. Then you are going to see effects on manufacturing industries in terms of regulation, and we are already starting to see concerns about export controls. Once we can apply a nanotechnology to actual military uses, then we are going to see serious export controls. But it is premature at this stage; that is a long-term factor.
Phoenix : I would like to question whether new technologies, in particular new data gathering and statistical technologies, might allow us to develop more streamlined ways of evaluating new treatments. For example, if you could do a treatment and study 100 or 1000 biochemical stress markers in real time, then you can tell right away if that treatment is doing something bad to the body. Or, if you can study that over a population, then you can tell right away if that treatment is efficacious in 30% or 80% of the patients. It may just be about time to look at revamping the current clinical trial system to be a lot more responsive to the new data that we will be able to gather. The second point: nanoscale technologies do not really have to be kept in check, just safe for the users. Molecular manufacturing probably does have to be kept in check because it has much broader capabilities and implications. We do not know all the problems yet; so we do not know which problems will have to be kept in check. As Christine said, rapid invention of new weapons and the almost immediate production of those weapons could be destabilizing. This may require new political structures, not just new regulations. As to the effect that regulations might have on medical and manufacturing industries, those regulations might actually protect the industries at the cost of consumer and economic progress. In other words, the regulations could easily be weightier than needed, and that extra weight could keep the industries more or less static and sustainable in their current business model, whereas a new business model would be better for everyone except the current industries. As manufacturing becomes more flexible, we will probably see industries fighting tooth and nail to preserve current business models; where if they were willing to accept a little creative destruction, they could have new business models that would be far better for the new industry, and, of course, for the consumers, nations, and economies involved.
Besides dealing with materials invisible to the naked eye, what are the biggest obstacles when working with nanotechnology?
Amiji : Our obstacles mainly come from not knowing what the interactions will be between the biological environment and these nanostructures. Sometimes it is the fear of the unknown that drives decisions, or just the lack of measurements of these interactions because we are dealing with a scale for which we do not yet have the tools to address some of the fundamental questions. Safety is going to be one particular challenge that we will have to address early on and also as we move towards developing more sophisticated nanostructures We will have to continuously ask the questions to make sure that what we are doing and what we are working with is safe.
Peterson : I will address this issue on a different level, perhaps a more societal level, and identify at least two challenges. One is that nanotechnology is a multidisciplinary area. What that means is you need to get people from different academic departments, perhaps even different schools, to work together, and they are not used to doing that. This is a challenge and it is making people who are trying to do nanotechnology have to come up with new forms of organization, new centers where we can try to bring these folks together. The second big challenge is funding. This is not two guys and a PC in a garage, the way the software industry got started. The equipment is expensive. It takes a larger team than many software projects do. It is good that we have the level of funding that we see now, but we could use even greater funding. Certainly in the medical area, it would be very easy to justify increased spending.
Phoenix : From my point of view, the biggest problem is that nanotechnology is not one field; it is not even a bunch of fields that have to work together. It is so broad that it is a bunch of fields that really have very little contact with each other. The problem is that there is only one word that covers all of this. One of the big problems is that when you say nanotechnology, are you talking about nanoparticles or nanobots or nanofactories?
So nanotechnology is used as a blanket statement to encompass many very different ideas. Besides the National Characterization Laboratory, are there organizations trying to develop a common lingo?
Phoenix : As far as I can tell, it is more a bunch of groups that are just using the word the way they like and hoping that their meaning will at least be clear. Sometimes it seems as though they hope that their meaning would replace all others. I do not think any group at this point can hope for that. For example, we decided to call ourselves the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, knowing that we were going to focus on molecular manufacturing, because one of the meanings of nanotechnology, in fact the first meaning, is molecular manufacturing. We have to hope that this has not caused too much confusion; I do not think either of the meanings are going away.
Peterson : I will agree with what Chris said on terminology. But in the near term, there are organizations that are working on definitions and terminology, such as ASTM International and ANSI. These standards organizations have active efforts in trying to standardize the language we use. This is pretty important because it is quite likely at some point we are going to see regulations come through, which are very likely to use terms like nanoparticle, nanodevice, nanosystem. It would be vital to have these terms properly defined. I am one of the members of the ASTM International Committee trying to grapple with this in nanotechnology. It is very difficult, and coming up with regulations based on the nanoparticle definition they have now perhaps would not work very well.
Phoenix : I did not mean that no term could be usefully defined. I was speaking mainly of the word nanotechnology itself, which I think has become a rather hopeless muddle and will probably stay a muddle for the foreseeable future. Certainly things like nanoparticle and nanodevice have less of a muddled history, although they are already becoming problematic. I certainly think that having a technical vocabulary is very useful.
Will changes prompted by nanotechnology be in the form of a jarring boom or will they gradually seep into culture, making it easier for people to accept?
Phoenix : I would say that it will be a jarring boom, which will be quickly and easily accepted. Looking at the changes that have come from computers, we have Napster. That was a jarring boom to the intellectual property infrastructure, and yet everyone else just accepted it and started using it, before and after it was made illegal. Google has been a jarring boom. It was founded in 1998, and I could not work without it today, but everyone just accepts it. Not only everyone accepts it, but everyone knows what it is. Probably half the people on the street will know what Google is. That is remarkable for less than ten years. The dot-com bubble showed that jarring booms can happen in measurable economic terms. A lot of people made money and a lot of people lost money, and it had an impact on economics. However, it did not really jar society overall. So, unless the boom is big enough to completely break the system, I would say we can accept far more change than we think we can.
Peterson : I like to think about nanotechnology progressing through three stages. Right now we are in the nanomaterial stage, then we go to nanodevices, then nanosystems. Currently, we are in a stage where nanotechnology is gradually seeping into our products and our culture, and there is very little consumer awareness that the products that they are using involve this early-stage nanotechnology. So, there is not much of an acceptance issue there. The rate of change will gradually increase. In other words, we are seeing accelerating change in the next 10, 20, and 30 years. In the longer term, when you get out into the 30-year time frame, from our perspective today it is going to feel like a fairly jarring boom of technology. But at least from the medical perspective and in terms of health applications, I would be very surprised if there is an increase in health and medical technology that could be rejected by the US or any population. We are talking about real increases in health. It is very hard to imagine that kind of thing being rejected.
Amiji : I agree with both of the previous individuals. I think in this particular case there is going to be a case-by-case approach. Some of it clearly will be a jarring boom, but then there are other things that are going to come and be part of our culture that most people accept. In the case of the medical field, there are already products that use nanotechnology that are on the market and are accepted. They went through the same rigorous review as any other pharmaceutical or medical product. The acceptance issue is not going to be that much of a concern. In certain areas you are starting to see things moving into the culture and being accepted well. There might be a few cases here and there where we will see that there is going to be a clash with some people of ‘why we are doing this?' Or, ‘are we spending our money wisely?' Overall, I think we are not going to see the same kinds of things that we have seen in other areas.
When talking to a man on the street, it seems as though a lot of people outside of the science and engineering fields have not heard of nanotechnology, or are unsure of what it means. What is being done to educate the public?
Amiji : I know from an academic point of view that there is a great deal of interest in outreach activities, especially for those of us involved in training grants that are providing support for educating the next generation of scientists in nanomedicine. We have started, and I know other training grant recipients have tried, to develop outreach activities in our local community through different approaches, going all the way from young children to high schoolers in order to try to educate on the benefits of nanotechnology. A lot of groups are trying to educate the public, especially the younger generation, in this area so that by the time they reach college age, this would be a nonissue at that point.
Peterson : The National Nanotechnology Initiative and the National Science Foundation actively encourage those who oversee their funding to do outreach. For example, I was privileged to sit in on the NSF review of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology Program at Rice University. It was highly emphasized that the folks there at CBEN were doing active outreach. They brought in teachers from the public schools in the summertime to interact directly with the researchers and to participate in the research, learn about nanotechnology, and take that back out into their classrooms. The National Nanotechnology Initiative is also funding a Center for Informal Science Education that will be doing nanotechnology education to adults in the general public. Then, there are independently funded and supported organizations such as Foresight, such as CRN, that reach out to the public using the Internet, the media, books, articles, lectures, etc., which are some of the best ways to reach out to adults in the community to educate them on nanotechnology.
Phoenix : I will start by reading an e-mail that we got at CRN relating to our Web site a few days ago. It says, “Hello, great Web site; very informative. Does the nanotechnology apply to the new Apple Nano i-Pods? Is there a danger to that product? Thanks.” Everyone who knows what nanotechnology is and cares about where it is going needs to be working on educating the public. To some extent, we should realize that the public as a whole will never completely get it. Our Web site has absolutely no hint that what we are saying relates to Nano i-Pods, and yet this person was confused. We need to keep working to explain what nanotechnology is about. I would like to put in a plug for giving careful, accurate, and well-grounded explanations of what molecular manufacturing is and how it relates to other fields of nanotechnology. I would encourage people who talk about nanoscale technologies to educate themselves on molecular manufacturing, where it is going, where it is not going, and how to explain to the public. Because saying it is impossible is not going to wash anymore. But I am not sure that the nanoparticle or the nanocomputer or the nanooptics or the nanomedical communicators have developed the message that will tell the relation between their work and nanobots and molecular manufacturing, because even nanobots and molecular manufacturing are distinct.
