Berkeley considering need for nano safety

Friday, November 24, 2006

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Berkeley wants to ensure the safety of nanotechnology, li...

Berkeley is proposing what a city official says would be the world's first local regulation of nanomaterials -- engineered particles and fibers so vanishingly small and super-efficient that they promise to revolutionize industry but pose possible health risks to people if inhaled or exposed to skin.

The proposal, which comes as federal officials are considering regulations on the growing nanotechnology industry, is "the first actual regulation of nanoparticles per se," said Nabil Al-Hadithy, the city of Berkeley's hazardous materials manager.

"There have been a great number of attempts to regulate them, and they've all amounted to nothing because of the fear of upsetting industry, which leaves workers and the community at some unknown risk," he said. "It's the unknown that's a concern to us."

The ordinance goes to the City Council for discussion on Dec. 5. If approved, it would add a nanoparticles health and safety disclosure to a city law that already requires an inventory and safety plan from any business or other person handling large quantities of hazardous materials.

UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are engaged in extensive research and development of nanomaterials in tiny amounts that researchers say pose no danger and are too small to study. But members of the city's Community Environmental Advisory Commission believe reporting at the local level is essential because so little is understood about the possible impact of the materials on human health.

Bob Clear, the commission's chairman and a part-time employee in the Lawrence Berkeley lab's building sciences department, said he expects the lab and the university to comply voluntarily but was uncertain if they would be required to make any disclosures to the city.

"We're worried more about startup firms, that they'll have an idea for some nano thing and start producing without knowing what they're doing," Clear said.

Local laws regulating nanoparticles have been proposed elsewhere, but "this is the only one I know of that's gotten traction so far," said Dave Rejeski, director of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies in Washington.

"The lack of information about what's going on tends to breed a lot of suspicion and mistrust," he said. "I think it's in the interests of companies and research labs to open up."

Thousands of times narrower than the width of a human hair, nanoparticles include spheres, fibers and other shapes engineered to have special properties useful in commercial, medical and military applications. They're brewed in the lab or assembled LEGO-like by moving atoms or molecules of carbon, iron or other elements.

Products that use nanomaterials include diet supplements, sunscreen, car bumpers, clothing and Jumbotron stadium lights. Scientists think future benefits could include stronger building materials, better cancer drugs, a more efficient power grid and supersensitive sensors to detect biological and chemical weapons.

The big advantage of nanomaterials is that they provide so much more surface area than the same amount of larger-grained materials. That quality makes a drop of sunscreen with nano-sized zinc oxide more effective at deflecting UV light than a drop of low-tech sunscreen.

Their molecule-size ingredients also make nanomaterials far smoother than conventional materials. Nano bowling balls roll straighter. Molecular bearings, springs and motors made from carbon nanotubes, a focus of research in Berkeley, are virtually wear-free.

But the same designer properties that make nanoparticles powerful also make them a possible threat to human health, according to the city proposal, which echoes a cautionary article on nanotechnology research signed by 14 international scientists and published in the latest issue of the British journal Nature.

Nanoparticles act like a gas and can pass through skin and lung tissue to penetrate cell membranes, according to the Berkeley proposal. Once inside the cell, they might become toxic or disrupt normal cell chemistry. Threadlike nanotubes are structurally similar to asbestos fibers, which can cause lung problems when inhaled in large amounts over long periods, according to a report by the Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national science academy.

The Berkeley proposal is the result of years of research by the city's environmental advisory commission. It is intended to have its greatest impact on future industries that use bulk quantities of nanomaterials.

The proposal also is aimed at research groups at UC Berkeley and the national lab, which are benefiting from expanded federal research funding under the now-$6.5 billion National Nanotechnology Initiative.

The university's physics department leads a $7.1 million federally funded project to develop nanomachines capable of performing complex tasks. The lab recently opened its Molecular Foundry, which provides free space for academic, government and industrial scientists to do nonproprietary research.

The national lab and UC Berkeley together make as many as 100 new nano compounds a month but in quantities so minuscule that there isn't enough for testing.

"The big thing is the numbers we're talking about now are so small that they will not yet have much effect," said Gavi Begtrup, a physics grad student working on nanomachines research at UC Berkeley.

The national lab's yearly output of nanomaterials totals less than a pound, said Mark Alper, the deputy director of the Molecular Foundry and a UC Berkeley adjunct professor of molecular biology.

He said health and safety guidelines for promising compounds should be set at the national or international level because the complexity of the issue requires expertise from many fields. "It makes no sense to test in a research lab because 99 percent of them aren't going anywhere," Alper said.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it will begin requiring makers of washing machines, food containers and other consumer products to provide scientific evidence that the use of extremely small particles of silver will not harm waterways or public health. The move comes as the federal Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to regulate nanotech products.

In the Nature article, scientists recommended that health and safety standards for nanoparticles should be developed in five to 15 years. They cited possible threats to workers from inhaling particles and to the public from waste washed into water supplies.

"The specter of possible harm -- whether real or imagined -- is threatening to slow the development of nanotechnology unless sound, independent and authoritative information is developed on what the risks are, and how to avoid them," the article warns.

Grad student Begtrup came to a similar conclusion in an award-winning paper he co-wrote with fellow student Brian Kessler for a campus competition.

"I didn't write the paper to scare people," he said. "I honestly don't think nanomaterials are going to be scary. The problem is that people are starting to think they may be. There are already activists out there saying nanomaterials are going to destroy the Earth.

"They may be a little bit off, but the real problem is we haven't done the research to refute them. We haven't done very much research to see what this does to the environment and what it does to people."

E-mail Rick DelVecchio at rdelvecchio@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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