Science Category Archive

Nanotechnology, risks and benefits

15 Replies Jonny Hankins

Last year Hayley posted a really good article on this site entitled ‘What do we need to know about Nanotechnology?‘ She raised some important issues about the governance of such high technology including the facts that little research has been conducted into health implications, legal regulation is minimal and nobody really knows how much of this type of material is produced. It is however already everywhere, in cosmetics, car wax and sunscreen to name but a few.

She followed the post earlier this year with another, ‘Nanobots, the future in Nanotechnology‘. This is also an informative piece in which she describes how nanotech engineering is moving away from top down construction to a bottom up approach, and goes on to talk about the possibility of building autonomous and even self replicating robots on the nano-scale.

Last week I posted an article about synthetic biology, another branch of science that deals in the nano-scale. With synthetic biology one of the issues raised by Hayley, that of power source, is resolved, as the machines are in fact alive and get their power from the organism that they are implanted into. The two are very much related and entwined forms of science.

And all this leads me on to looking at regulation regarding these types of research and a recent publication entitled ‘A Research Strategy for Environmental, Health and Safety Aspects of Engineered Nanotechnologies’.

The document was prepared by the National Research Council and a pre publication copy is available from the National Academic Press for downloaded here.

This is a long and detailed document written with the help of a host of academics, and it raises some very important points about an industry that Barak Obama has placed at the forefront of his innovation policy. In this year’s budget Obama is asking for 123.5 million dollars to invest in nano-tech research, which if seen next to the relatively small investment of 34.8 million in 2005 signals the importance attached to this form of innovation.

Nanobama

But all of this investment is made in a technology that is as yet practically unregulated and severely lacking in health and safety legislation, with the problem being that exposure limits and contamination issues have yet to be formalized. All of this is despite the ever growing use of such particles in our everyday life.

The National Research Council document aims to develop such a research strategy starting from a conceptual framework for considering environmental, health and safety risks, through critical questions to understanding the problem, tools and approaches for identifying properties that may cause risk, resources needed and how to implement the strategy once it has been described.

The document is extremely thought provoking. The fact that safe (or dangerous) exposure levels to such particles have never been determined nor possible environmental release dangers quantified or analyzed seems to paint a picture of an entire industry that operates without a clear understanding of how to manage the risks involved in their work.

This week a rather alarming report was published on the Science News website in which scientists have discovered that exposure to nano-particles changes the way blood vessels in animals behave. They were not using a poisonous substance I might add, but a common compound of nano-particle size.

Now I am not a biologist but I imagine that if it affects mice in this way then it will probably do the same to me.

I would summarize the problem as this; regulation and law making always has a problem when dealing with high technology, lawmaking is a slow process, but technological advancement is not. Laws chase while science runs ahead. But here we are dealing with a serious situation, something is in mass production and use, generating large sums of money but practically unregulated and untested.

The possible up-sides of nanotechnology are enormous, but I would say that the down-sides need to be taken into account too.

For a more in depth debate see my and other’s posts on the Bassetti Foundation website.

What is Synthetic Biology?

4 Replies Jonny Hankins

In my work I write about nanotechnology and synthetic biology and over the next couple of weeks I would like to describe what is happening in these high technology fields. I start with synthetic biology. I am not a scientist and cannot give any form of technical description of how they do what they do. I can present a kind of sketch though of what they are doing and their aims.

The first question then must be what is synthetic biology? Well it is something that can be described as engineering, biology, genetics or nanotechnology, the most common description is that of applying the concept of engineering to biological organisms. But what does that actually mean?

Well, synthetic biology aims to design and engineer biologically based parts, novel devices and systems as well as redesigning existing, natural biological systems. Practitioners use a systems approach, an organism is seen as a whole, or a system, and can therefore be engineered, very much like a machine.

you see, kid's stuff

The system is reduced to biological parts (bioparts) whose function is expressed in terms of input/output characteristics. Once these parts have been described in terms of their function, isolated, standardised and syntheticaly reproduced, they can then be combined to from new organisms, very much in the way that an engineer would build a machine using standard devices built from standard parts. It is just that they are parts of a living organism.

These standard parts are defined by their DNA, and this can be manipulated in order to make the perfect part for the perfect device. Parts of the DNA can be removed and synthetic pieces used to replace them. Create the right part that does the right job, put in it a carrier cell (known as chassis) and Bob’s your Uncle, you can start to construct your organism.

The Biobricks Foundation is a not for profit organization that aims to keep a register of these standard parts, maintaining open access and promoting technical standardization, something that is seen as holding the key to the further development of synthetic biology.

Obviously to do all of the above you require technical expertise, the process requires computational modeling in order to analyze the complexities of biological entities and to predict system performance. You require DNA sequencing in order to describe the genome and then of course DNA synthesis, to re-produce either part of or the entire genome itself.

But what are the potential areas of application for this technology, and what can they actually do now?

One of the main fields is undoubtedly medicine. Drugs can be produced that are more effective or have fewer or even no side effects, as the genomes of their active components can be adjusted and synthesized. An example is the development of a synthetic version of the anti-malarial drug Artermisinin that could be industrially and cheaply mass produced, and in the near future antibiotics could become much more efficient.

Another existing application is water that changes colour when in contact with different polluting agents making them instantly recognizable. Switches already exist that react to certain types of input. An example could be a cell that is part of a person’s body that reacts to the stimulus of a certain chemical that in turn stimulates the production of another. Imagine for example a device that reacts to a chemical produced by a cancerous cell. This input causes a reaction that produces another chemical to counteract this presence. All working naturally using the body’s energy to function.

Other developments involve the energy sector, the production of plants for bio mass that are not as wasteful as those used today and even the development of synthetic aviation fuels.

In other fields a synthetic form of the silk produced by the Golden Orb spider is under development. This is an extremely strong, fine and lightweight material that could lead the way towards new specialist engineering materials.

They are even working on living computer memory, and  this article describes breakthroughs and results in DNA computing.

Well this is nothing but reasonable, my memory lives in my brain and the memory of my ancestors in my DNA, and now they have the technology to read it and even change it, so why not use it in a computer?

I have written several articles on this and other related topics on the Bassetti Foundation website, and as I said I am no scientist, so all comments and criticism invited and accepted.

A Bad Memory Erasing Pill

6 Replies Jonny Hankins

The February issue of Wired magazine contained an article about an interesting medical breakthrough related to memory. Scientists working on the development of a pill that can erase bad memories have achieved success in laboratory rats.

memory erasing pill

Bad memories, a thing of the past?

It is a long and detailed article, but I will try to summarize it in a few sentences. Memories are stored in different parts of the brian, emotions in one part, visuals in another etc. In order to remember something a sort of chain must be formed that link the separate parts of the memory, a chain formed by protein. If you can block the protein you can block access to the memory.

Scientists have been experimenting for decades to try and find a compound that can do this, and recently seem to have found one that works on rats. The experiment is relatively simple, the rats are exposed to series that they learn to recognize, an example might be a series of musical notes followed by a painful electric shock. As soon as the rats hear the first note in the series they get scared and agitated. Administer the compound and the association is lost, you can play the series and the rats no longer remember the consequences until BANG, the shock arrives.

Cruel but bearing important consequences, if the links in the chain can be broken then the memory is not cancelled but the individual no longer has access to it.

As I said above different parts of the memory are stored in different places, so the hope is that different compounds will be able to delete different aspects of painful memories. One might close access to the memory of the scent of an ex girlfriend who left you for your best mate, or the pain experienced in an accident, or the vision of your dog jumping out of your third floor bedroom window while chasing a ball that you accidentally threw too hard for him to catch, or other such traumas.

Talk is of selected memory loss by pill, but of course this is far in the future if ever at all, but the very prospect raises some interesting ethical dilemmas. We are who we are by experience. I don’t play with knives; I have a scar with 7 stitches in my hand to remind me why, but even without it the memory of a Christmas Eve trip to Wythenshawe Hospital lingers on.

And having seen various governments conduct more than questionable research on their own populations (and others) and I am not just talking about despot regimes but the very birth states of democracy themselves as this apology given by President Obama demonstrates, I sincerely question the ethics behind such a development.

So the question is this, are we seeing a great medical and technological breakthrough, a leap in human advancement, or the creation of another dangerous tool once it gets into the wrong hands?