Question: You work with nanoparticles so that you can treat disease, but aren't there worries that using nano technologies can actually be damaging to your health?

Paige Brown answered on 16 Mar 2012:

Hi Jonese!!!

This is my new favorite question!

Yes, there are worries that nanotechnologies can damage the environment, or have side effects on our health that we don’t know about. I certainly wouldn’t go drink a solution of nanoparticles (although some people do – the ‘Blue Man’ drinks silver nanoparticles… and his skin has turned blue! http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2009/09/10/msnbc-revisits-the-blue-man-spoiler-his-skin-is-still-blue/).

There are nanoparticles in the air all around us that we breathe in all the time. Some are good or fine for us, some are not so good (there are nanoparticles in ‘smog’ than can cause respiratory problems). So if nanoparticles are all around us, why are we so worried about the risks of nanotechnology? http://2020science.org/2008/04/05/i%E2%80%99m-breathing-in-nanoparticles-so-why-aren%E2%80%99t-i-dead-already/

The best thing that researchers can do is to test the effects of new nanoparticles that they make on human health and the environment. Gold nanoparticles are actually injected into people to find and treat diseases, so we might not be worried about these types of nanoparticles… but other types may have damaging effects on the environment when they accumulate in waste areas. The worry about nanoparticles is not that they are a ‘new’ type of materials (in fact, these materials are some of the same materials we know very well when they are make in bulk sizes, like a gold or silver ring that you wear on your finger), but that nanoparticles are so small that almost every part of the nanoparticle is ‘surface’. The high surface area causes some nanoparticles to be very active and reactive with other molecules in the environment or inside of our bodies.

Nanotechnology can be a life-saver… but it can also pose threats if we don’t know what we are doing and we release a ton of nanoparticles into the environment, or don’t dispose of them properly. The study of looking at the risks of nanoparticles to human health and the environment is known as ‘nanotoxicology’. This field is growing as researchers attempt to make sure that the nanoparticles we are making to help cure cancer and other diseases are not damaging to other parts of our body or our environment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanotoxicology