ICON Blog

The American Industrial Hygiene Association held its annual meeting this year in Toronto with a theme of Discoveries Beyond Borders. After the Monday morning keynote address by Dr. Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, the next two keynotes were on issues AIHA has identified as “two major challenges in the field: sustainability and nanotechnology.” Addressing the issue of sustainability was Edward L. Quevedo, JD, special counsel chair for the sustainability group at Farella Braun and Martel. (An interview with Mr. Quevedo about his keynote is posted here.)

My talk kicked off Wednesday’s focus on nanotechnology. Before and after the keynote talk I was able to hang out at NIOSH’s exposition booth where I was graciously provided an internet-connected computer on which to live-demo the GoodNanoGuide to passersby. But the invitation to speak before a crowd of about 1000 occupational safety professionals provided an ideal opportunity to formally launch the GoodNanoGuide, an international online collaborative wiki designed to create a forum for people seeking to work with engineered nanomaterials safely. The format of the keynote address did not allow for questions, so AIHA set aside a separate time and place for an “Ask the Expert” session later on Wednesday morning. This session was attended by about a hundred people and we eschewed the formal structure of me sitting up on a dais for a more informal conversational mode. This involved me running up and down the aisles passing the microphone back and forth among the questioners, myself and others in the audience better equipped to answer a given question. (Most times, this was Chuck Geraci, Laura Hodson or Donna Heidel from NIOSH who could report on specific research being done at the institute to inform occupational practice.)

Feedback to the talk and to the GoodNanoGuide was positive and we noted a major spike in visits to the site during the meeting. But even more importantly, we are already beginning to field requests to join the GoodNanoGuide community. (We map their locations here.) This is vital because the site will only grow into the knowledge base we all want it to become if a diverse and robust community of experts contributes. Join us by visiting the GoodNanoGuide here and registering as a contributor.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced that it has published a database of research projects related to the safety of manufactured nanomaterials. If that sounds vaguely familiar, it's because this database was created by and used to reside at the website of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Back in the day, when there was only a small number of databases relating to nanotech safety issues, we had a grand vision of creating a central resource for sifting through the growing information about nano-EHS. ICON's first step in that direction was to allow someone visiting our bibliographic database of nano-EHS papers to search the NIOSH Nanoparticle Information Library (NIL) and the PEN research database from our site.

The complementarity among these independent efforts can be illustrated with a hypothetical example. Imagine you are a researcher looking for information on quantum dot toxicity. From one site you could (a) find the research already published on the subject (ICON), (b) discover information about the particles from manufacturers or other users of the materials (NIL) and (c) get a sense for what's coming in the future by perusing active government-funded quantum dot research projects (PEN). And, what's more, you could conduct such a search no matter which database you landed in because each would offer the ability to search the others.

For a time, it started to look like this would work. First ICON and NIL offered this triple-search ability at each other's site. (PEN reciprocity was put on hold when OECD agreed to take over and maintain the research database.) Then the NIOSH NIL went offline over concerns about computer security. The PEN database is now the OECD database and it now points to ICON but the ICON database doesn't point to it yet. Oh, yeah, and there are now lots more niche databases online or (mostly) under development.

But stay tuned for future developments. We will change our Advanced Search function to allow searching within the OECD database as soon as our Web Services gets to it. And the NIOSH NIL may soon rise again, though outside of NIOSH's firewall. As for integration of all the other databases popping up out there, I'm open to exploring this. Funding agencies and other benefactors: Call me.