Todays Royal Society report on nanotechnology contains little new (at least for TNTlog readers), but at least pulls it all together in one place and with sufficient gravitas that many non nanotechnologists will sit up and take some interest.
Howard Lovy, over at Nanobot is keeping track of some of the reactions. Most of the headlines look alarmingly similar, being dividing into two broad camps of New laws needed for nanotech or Nanotech not as dangerous as thought with the odd smattering of Nanotech will stimulate economic growth.
Many of the reports recommendations deal with regulatory issue, and we will deal with these in some length over the next week. This is a potential minefield that requires some careful negotiation.
For the time being, we take issue with the third recommendation of the Comission:
We recommend that Research Councils UK establish an interdisciplinary centre (probably comprising several existing research institutions) to research the toxicity, epidemiology, persistence and bioaccumulation of manufactured nanoparticles and nanotubes as well as their exposure pathways, and to develop methodologies and instrumentation for monitoring them in the built and natural environment.
Call us cynics, but if you put a bunch of academics on a committee it is no surprise that one of the calls will be for more research funding. More research needs to be done, but it seems counter productive to call for European legislation but a UK toxicology centre. This centre really needs to be at the European level, so as to ensure that the best minds are well funded to help guide decisions on a European level. Any policy that leads to separate Dutch, German, British and French toxicology centres is both wasteful and dilutes the impact of the research. While calls for cooperation with other centres are admirable, academic research is just as competitive as the business world, and competition is not what is needed.
The report rightly acknowledges the sprawling nature of nanotechnology, the difficulty of defining it, goes as far to prefer the phrase nanotechnologies. While the UK government promises a response by the end of the year, the legislation that matters, as with the chemical industry, will be drawn up in Brussels, and will affect the competitiveness of the entire continent, and may not differentiate between different sub species of nanotechnology (as cheese makers across the continent will testify). It will however, as with GMOs affect the adoption of nanotechnology on a global level.