Size matters: welcome to the wild and wooly world of nanotechnology, the dwelling place of nanotubes, nanoshells, fullerenes, "buckyballs," quantum dots and nanowhiskers. These objects are measured in the billionth-scale. As the size of these products shrink further, their risk in industrial use increases. Insurers remain wary

Call it the Nanoteehnology Revolution. The tiniest substances promise to transform industry and create a huge market. In chemicals, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, technology and textiles, businesses are researching and manufacturing products based on nanotechnology, which uses bits of matter measured in billionths of a meter. The technology, utilizing materials a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, is showing up in everything from auto parts to sunscreens and clothing.

The market for nanotechnology products is expected to grow to around $200 billion in 2010 from about $50 billion in 2001, according to industry estimates, and could exceed $1 trillion within 15 years, the National Science Foundation has estimated. These are big numbers indeed, particularly from such small phenomena.

While industry works to develop the promise of nanotechnology, insurers--badly burned by their experience with small substances such as asbestos--are expressing caution about the developing technology as new products enter the markets and potential liabilities build on their books.

"Some products are leaving the labs now and entering the market," says Annabelle Hett, Deputy of Risk Engineering Services for Swiss Re, based in Zurich, and author of a recent study on potential nanoteehnology liabilities.

"There is potential exposure that is growing from now on. We're not talking about huge exposure in 2004, but we're talking about a potential exposure a couple years down the road because these products are just getting ready," Hett says.

FEARS OF "GRAY GOO"

From the start, nanotechnology has carried with it a whiff of science fiction horror, in which incredibly small self-replicating robots, called nanobots, reduce the living world to mush in what is known as the "gray goo" scenario.

In the real world, researchers are simply working with smaller forms of existing materials to improve established products. For instance, BASF has had a big success using nanosized zinc oxide particles to make sunscreen that is transparent and more effective. U.S. textile developer Nano-Tex uses nanoscale carbon "whiskers" to make clothing that is stain resistant and water repellent.

"Any application that you can imagine a material being used in, you could imagine nanotechnology making it better," says Kristen Kulinowski, executive director for education and public policy for the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University in Houston.

In the future, nanoscale particles may allow for the remediation of heavily polluted sites, allow for better diagnosis and more effective treatment of cancer, provide indoor lighting that is twice as efficient as today, make manufacturing cleaner, and, of course, lead to much smaller and powerful computers. For instance, Intel Corp.'s newest processors are based on 90-nanometer technology, while International Business Machines Corp. and General Electric Co. are looking at carbon nanotubes as transistors and sensors.

"There really isn't any one technology that we can call nanotechnology. It's much, much more accurate to say that what we're seeing is the logical culmination of long historical trends in the miniaturization of many different technologies," says Tom Theis, director of physical sciences at IBM Research.

There are, however, real concerns about how some nanoscale particles will affect humans and the environment. While most work today uses smaller forms of existing materials, the smaller versions may differ in toxicity or behave differently.

As even ordinary materials get smaller, they take on different properties. For instance, while wheat doesn't blow up in a field, finely ground grain can explode in a grain elevator, and aluminum burns violently when reduced to a powder, says Marcel Buerge, Swiss Re's head of Risk Engineering Services.

By reducing such particle sizes by a factor of a hundred thousand, things can get very weird as the classical physics of the everyday world yields to quantum physics.

"By reducing the size below 100 nanometers you are entering the laws of quantum physics which means the chemical and physical properties of that material change dramatically in a way that we have a hard time understanding," Hett says.

That small size, for instance, means that particles become more highly reactive and can travel in unexpected ways through the human body. While it's not clear that nanoparticles can enter through the skin, they can be inhaled and from there travel into the bloodstream and even get into the brain.

"That is news," Hett says. "There's not very much out there that's actually able to get through the blood-brain barrier because the brain is a very highly protected organ," Hett says.

A recent study of nanoparticles known as fullerenes--or "buckyballs" for their soccer-ball shape reminiscent of the geodesic domes created by architect Buckminster Fuller--showed fish suffered brain damage after being exposed to such particles in water. The results of those studies, however, are not transferable to other nanoscale materials.

"If you ask yourself 'to what extent can we extrapolate to the other materials of the same size,' we can't because buckyballs are quite different from nanotubes are quite different from quantum dots are quite different from iron nanoparticles, for instance," says Clayton Teague, director of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Coordination Office.

RISKS VS. OPPORTUNITIES

That is not to say that there are no real risks.

"As with every other new technology we have to look not only for the opportunities, we have to measure for the risks. And there may be some risks. We don't know yet, but these risks can be classified," says Rudiger Iden, Head of the Polymer Physics Department at BASF, the world's leading chemical company.

In plastics, for instance, the nanostructures are bound to the material itself and so present no risk, Iden says, while in sunscreen the nanoparticles are bound within the sunscreen or to the skin and also present no risk because zinc oxide is non-toxic.

The risks of nanoparticles as an aerosol that could be inhaled, however, are not really known in part because existing techniques are not adequate to measure such particles in the air or to follow them in the environment, Iden says.

"All the other things we still believe are safe because the nanoparticles are in containment," Iden says. "Nevertheless, we have to look wherever aerosols can exist as nanoparticles whether they have different toxic effects from coarser particles or from the pure chemical entity."

To assess the potential risks, industry and U.S. and European governments have launched aggressive research programs.

"I would say almost every aspect of potential health and environmental concerns are being looked at. We're looking at routes of exposure; there's research into the routes of exposure, exposure levels and possible toxicity," Teague says.

Experiences with asbestos and other hazards had made clear the dangers of not identifying risks ahead of time, Teague says.

"Those concerns over those that we already knew about-asbestos, silica, welding fumes and things of that nature--they without question have sensitized us with nanoscale materials to the potential problems there might be from a new class of materials," Teague says.

While scientists are working to build new particles atom by atom, it is worth noting that nanoscale particles are not new and exist in desert dust, exhaust from diesel engines and natural gas furnaces. "They're not as foreign as sometimes they may be painted," Teague says.

For industries that work with new materials, the key is to treat these very small particles with care until their safety or toxicity is established.

HANDLE WITH CARE

"Every material that we are going to use in production, in manufacturing should be regarded as suspect until it's been proven that it's safe or that we have regulations and procedures for safe handling," IBM's Theis says. "We don't want to fool ourselves that these things are inert; we do want to test them."

Industry also has a very long history of working with new materials and chemists create thousands of new compounds a year, a fraction of which are put into production.

In the meantime, the industry and the U.S. government are working on a set of best practices guidelines for handling nanomaterials in the laboratory and the workplace that they expect to have ready for public comment by October.

"This has been put on what most people consider to be a fairly fast track," Teague says. Those best practices would include recommendations for personal protective equipment and working with the materials.

Among current protective practices, BASF for example, uses automated "closed systems" to handle nanoparticles where possible so there is no worker exposure. Where that is not possible, the company provides protective clothing and filters.

Besides the potential physical risks, the current legal climate in the United States also exposes businesses to "phantom risks" that are based not on science, but on fear.

"Sometimes 'fear of' would be enough to trigger certain claims," Hett says. While there may not be any real product liability, companies would still face the cost of defending themselves from lawsuits and those costs could be substantial.

"That is an issue, the whole 'fear of,' and that again depends very much on the perception of the public," Hett says.

Fear of new technology could also lead to public opposition to nanotechnology, as happened with genetically modified foods. While the technology has been widely accepted in the United States, many European shoppers have shunned food products using genetically modified crops that critics blasted as "Frankenfood."

"In order to prevent that, you have to take the turf now. You have to frame the issue ... because once the field is taken and there's a highly emotional debate, it's very hard to get your story through," Hett says. "We are actually racing against time already."

Teague noted, however, that a national survey had shown that 80 percent of respondents currently were not worried by nanotechnology. Industry also has moved early to build public support for nanotechnology both in the United States and in Europe.

"Every political party in Germany, including the Green Party, is supporting nanotechnology as having much more opportunities than risks," Iden says. "The situation from that point is totally different to the discussion we had years ago on GM, gene modification and GMO, genetically modified organisms." To ensure that the image doesn't turn negative, industry participants need to address potential concerns with the public along with the benefits, because perceptions can sometimes be enough to stop new technology cold.

"There is a very strong interest among not only the insurance industry, but also the insureds, the people who are developing and bringing nanotechnology to the marketplace, to ensure those perceptions don't tank the industry," Kulinowski says.

For their part, insurers are going to want to know what possible downsides the new materials may have, especially since it is likely to be a part of so many industries.

"We should damn well know what we do insure under such a large technical umbrella as nanotech that it is going to penetrate all types of industries. That means we have it in all types of policies on our books. This makes us a bit uneasy," Swiss Re's Buerge says.

Another reason to understand the risks, is so that insurers can comfortably participate in the market without having to institute exclusion clauses, and so exclude themselves from business.

"If this is truly a huge growth market we want to participate," Hett says. "In order for us to participate, we need to do our fair share to enable the introduction of the technology and this is why we want to address these issues early in time because if you can identify them, you can address them, you can manage them, and you can eliminate them eventually."

Shrinking Toward the Vanishing Point

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, manufacturers have been relentlessly developing ever smaller machines and substances.

From the millimeter scale of lithography for printing presses. industry has been moving to smaller and smaller scales at an accelerating pace, first breaking through the micron scale, measured in millionths of a meter, and now to nanoscale, or billionths of a meter.

In the last half century, information technology has been at the forefront of that drive to miniaturize. Computer processors, for example, have moved from a scale measured in millionths of a meter to a scale measured in billionths of a meter.

For instance, the first stored program computer, the famed ENIAC of the post-war 1940s, weighed more than 30 tons with its power and cooling equipment and filled a huge room. A typical processor in a game player today has vastly more computational power at a cost a billion times cheaper per computation, says Tom Theis, director of physical sciences at IBM Research.

"There's no fundamental reason why information technology couldn't get a billion times cheaper in the next 30 or 50 years," Theis says. But information technology is just one of the areas, where nanotechnology is expected to play a role.

Nanoscale particles may contribute extra mechanical strength, and so make it possible to make lighter, stronger materials, or provide extra protection in sunscreens by absorbing more ultraviolet radiation with a clear rather than white cream. The technology is already being used in tennis rackets and clothes, but may one day soon be used throughout the spectrum of manufacturing, information technology and health care.

"The availability of new materials and ever more miniaturized and powerful information technology products and devices is going to greatly affect our lives," says Clayton Teague, director of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Coordination Office. Nanotechnology offers the potential to improve the quality of the environment and health care, and provide access to clean and inexpensive energy, Teague says.

Among the nanoscale particles being used and researched are carbon nanotubes, nanoshells, fullerenes or buckyballs, quantum dots, nanowhiskers and iron nanoparticles.

The following is a brief description of those particles and their uses.

Carbon nanotubes are tubes made from sheets of carbon atoms rolled up in a hexagonal, wire mesh pattern. International Business Machines Corp. and General Electric Co. have been researching their potential for use in new computer chips and sensors. Another firm is adding nanotubes to carbon fibers to make stiffer tennis rackets. Nanotubes are 10 times stronger than carbon fiber.

Fullernes or buckyballs, named after architect Buckminster Fuller who popularized geodesic domes, are soccer ball-shaped carbon molecules. They have been found to inflict brain damage on fish exposed to them. Scientists looking at potential cancer treatments, however, are considering coating them with chemotherapy drugs or encasing radioisotopes in them to deliver them directly to cancer tumors.

Nanoshells, which are silica spheres, are essentially glass beads. When coated with gold, the nanoshells absorb infrared light. Researchers at Rice University are looking at using them as a cancer treatment. Placed in tumors, the gold-coated nanoshells would absorb the radiation and heat up enough to kill the cancerous tissue.

Quantum dots are silicon atoms just a nanometer across. They emit light when supplied with energy and could be used one day to make lighting that is twice as efficient as current fluorescent lights, or as sensors within the human body.

Nanowhiskers are carbon strands 10 nanometers long. When attached to cloth fibers, the nanowhiskers repel liquids, making clothing stain proof and water repellent. Developed by Nano-Tex, the fibers can also can be used to give synthetic fabrics a cotton-like feel.

Iron nanoparticles, when reduced to nanoscales, may one day be used to remediate heavily polluted sites. The highly reactive iron particles in them help to break pollutants down into simpler, safer compounds.

--Michael Fitzpatrick

COPYRIGHT 2004 Axon Group
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group