Interested in learning more about nanotechnology safety? Join me and four colleagues for a webinar hosted by Small Times. (Sorry about the registration fee, which I am assured is needed to pay for the cost of webcast and phone charges. I do not earn a fee for this gig.)
DATE: May 27, 2010 TIME (US): 1:00 PM ET | 12:00 PM CT | 10:00 AM PT
Understanding Nanotechnology Safety This seminar is of interest to anyone concerned about the potential health hazards of exposure to nanoengineered materials. Workers may be exposed to nanomaterials in many different manufacturing environments, and this seminar will educate them on the real risks. The seminar is also designed to educate employers about what they need to know to ensure worker safety and what types of nano materials are of the most concern. Of significant interest to CEOs/CTOs of technology companies (SMEs), Health and Safety officers of technology companies (SMEs), Government officials (HSE), Toxicology experts, and venture capitalists.
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.
Janelia Farm, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute located outside Washington, DC, was the picturesque setting of HHMI’s annual Environmental Health & Safety Directors Conference. The theme this year: Nanotechnology and the New Economy—Modern Challenges in ES&H Management. In the audience were about 50 high-level EHS managers at universities that are part of the HHMI network. The level of prior knowledge about nanotechnology was mixed. As we learned, some were very knowledgeable, others knew in which labs nanotech research was being pursued at their institutions, and a few had little more than passing knowledge.
The science keynote address was given by Drew Endy, PhD, assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. A very interesting and provocative speaker (though in an unassuming way), Endy gave a series of slides he calls “postcards” outlining the ways in which synthetic biology is being developed. His presentation style consisted of speaking to the audience using slides with minimal content, except when needed to illustrate a technical point. (I liked this approach better than the “stuff lots of content onto your slides so people would not even have had to be there to get the gist. Which usually doesn’t work.) So quotable was he that my Twitterstream on this (#HHMIEHS) does a better job capturing the highlights than I can do here. Suffice it to say that Endy effectively presented a lot of the cutting edge developments in synbio, if he fell a tad short on offering advice to EHS managers about how to handle safety issues in their institutions. The closest he came was an illustration of a student’s home-brew synbio lab, constructed in her bedroom closet, in which her coat was clearly visible among the instruments. I had the same reaction to his talk that I had to the synbio thread at last summer’s GRC on Science and Technology in Society: Wow.
My session was entitled, “Nanotechnology & Safety Management—A New Relationship”. Joining me were Jo Anne Shatkin, PhD, Managing Director of CLF Ventures and Charles Geraci, PhD, CIH, Coordinator of the Nanotechnology Program at the US National Institute of Occupational Safety & Health (NIOSH). Given the content of our prepared remarks the three of us decided we had been placed in the agenda in the wrong order and staged a soft coup the morning of the meeting, rearranging ourselves in a more sensible order. Questions were held until the end of our talks.
Thus it was that Jo Anne started off the session with a nice overview of nanotechnology and the attendant issues that complicate an assessment of its health and safety impacts. She outlined her approach to risk assessment of nanomaterials, presented in more detail in her new book, “Nanotechnology: health and environmental risks.”
Chuck Geraci was up next, giving a thorough account of NIOSH’s many activities in nanotechnology. He spent some time describing a simple framework for identifying occupational safety issues, summarizing some of NIOSH’s recent toxicological research, including recent work presented at the SOT meeting showing long-straight multi-walled carbon nanotubes penetrating the pleural lining (AKA “The Image”). NIOSH commentary on this work can be found at the NIOSH blog. He ended by plugging the updated guidance document along with a recent document on medical surveillance programs, both available at the NIOSH nanotechnology page.
Faced with a room full of EHS Directors gathered to hear the latest about nanotechnology, what else could I do but talk at some length about the GoodNanoGuide? I gave my pitch, walked through a brief live demo of the site and invited them to participate.
For once, the schedule was constructed to allow for a generous Q&A session, even considering that collectively we went over our allotted speaking time. (In too many of these meetings, “panel” equates to “speakers talking too long leaving audience little to no time for questions.” The ABA CLE was like this.) And this audience availed itself of every minute. Among the discussion threads we pursued were
The state of knowledge of occupational practices as they relate to medical applications of nanotechnology [a natural for this audience]
Whether control banding should be applied to nanomaterials and which form might be best
How to get wayward academics to understand and enforce good occupational practices in their labs [lots of grumbling about the tyranny of the academic overlords (PhD faculty) who fail to appreciate the humble servants that are only trying to help them (EHS managers).]
Whether biosafety protocols should be in place for labs working with nanomaterials. [Setting up a Level 1-4 type of containment system similar to that used by labs working with known or potential pathogens.]
This last question caught the three of us somewhat flat-footed. It is not a concept I have heard discussed in many other forums on nano-safety. I suppose EHS managers who deal with medical research think more about biosafety than many others in the nanotechnology community who have more of a chemical safety mindset. The question is whether the biosafety approach can be justified, and for which types of nano research. One obvious difference between current nanomaterials and, say, the Ebola virus, is that today’s nanomaterials are still largely the Phase 1 “passive” materials presented in Mike Roco’s much disseminated scheme. Until we progress to the later stages of nanotechnology we should not be overly concerned with nanoparticles multiplying.
Response to our session was very positive and I expect to hear from many of these people again as we all grapple with the occupational issues surrounding academic nanotechnology research. Plus, Janelia Farm is a very cool place to visit.
The American Industrial Hygiene Conference and Expo (AIHce) will be held this year between May 30–June 4 in Toronto, CA. The theme of Discoveries without Borders dovetails nicely with the two sessions being offered on sustainability and nanotechnology. (I will be presenting on global challanges to nano-EHS on Wednesday, June 4.) This article, AIHce: A Value in Economy, is obviously aimed at generating healthy attendance at what is no doubt a key revenue generator for the AIHA. However, the title got me thinking about the role of occupational safety in tough economic times. As companies trim every possible ounce of fat from their budgets, they have an obligation not to skimp on workplace safety for their employees and responsible safeguards for the environment. Doing this in a nanotechnology-related enterprise can be challenging, not because there is little will, but because good guidance can be difficult to find and interpret. That makes it even more important for those with knowledge to distribute it as broadly as possible. A good place to start for those in North America (AIHA's key constituency) is with the nanotechnology pages at NIOSH and IRSST. We hope that the GoodNanoGuide will serve as a resource for companies as well when it goes public this summer.
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.
The url http://www.goodnanoguide.org has now been registered. Until we launch publicly unregistered people can view the sponsors page (natch) and request provider status. Providers should have some relevant expertise to offer which is why we're asking just a few questions about credentials. No anonymous contributions are allowed at this time.
The International Council on Nanotechnology is a multistakeholder forum for developing and communicating information about nanomaterial risk. Please visit us at http://icon.rice.edu.
