Andrew D. MAYNARD
Chief Science Advisor, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies
Health and environmental safety of nanotechnology
—Interview with Dr. Andrew Maynard—
(Issued in Japanese: August 16, 2006)
When we talk about the risk assessment and management of nanomaterials, nobody would disagree that occupational health is the highest priority. Dr. Andrew Maynard has been working in this field for a long time. He has been attending many meetings and organizing meetings on EHS (Environment, Health and Safety) implications of nanotechnology all over the world. He was also invited to the international symposium “Exploring the Small World: Role of Public Research Institutes“ held in Tokyo on February 1, 2006. We had an opportunity to interview Dr. Maynard after the symposium.
Q: First, would you introduce your professional carrier, especially relating to EHS implications of nanotechnology briefly?
I got interested in nanoparticles seventeen or eighteen years ago, when I was looking at analyzing nanometer size atmospheric particles using high-resolution electron microscopy. From the beginning of the 1990s, for about seven or eight years, I worked in occupational health in the UK, looking at much larger particles. In the 1990s, there was a movement towards trying to understand health impact of, what were then called, ultra fine particles -- the incidental particles -- such as diesel emissions and welding fumes. I was working for the British Health and Safety Executive (HSE) at the time.
In 2000, I moved from Britain to the US, working for NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) in the US. There, I began to look, in far more detail, not only at the ultra fine particle exposure, but also at people being exposed potentially to these engineered nanometer sized particles. Thus in the last four or five years, I’ve gone back to looking at analyzing and characterizing nanoparticles again.
Incidental nanoparticles and engineered nanoparticles
Q: In your experience, is there any difference between incidental nanoparticles and engineered nanoparticles?
I think there are some very big differences and there are also some similarities. If you are asking the question, what is the possible harm to people’s health or what is the possible harm to the environment, there are a great many similarities, because, of course, if you have a particle in your body, your body doesn’t care whether that came from a vehicle emission or engineered process. All that it cares about is how dangerous that particle is.
Now in a different context, there are some very important differences. The biggest differences with incidental nanoparticles are that they come with many different characteristics such as sizes, shapes, and chemistries. So what we are exposed to is a very diverse cocktail of materials. On the other hand, regarding the engineered nanomaterials people want to make materials with very specific characteristics. So in an ideal case, you’ll have nanoparticles where every particle is identical to every other particle. Now, that may mean that if you just hit those characteristics which are important to human health, you can make something very toxic or if you hit a set of characteristics which aren’t important to human health, you can have materials which are very benign. Another difference is that if you are engineering the material, the intention is not for people to be exposed in most cases. You want to keep that material as contained as possible. On the other hand, incidental particles end up as a byproduct of a process.
Exposure measurement of nanoparticles
Q: The measurement of engineered nanoparticles in workplaces must be difficult.
I think it’s difficult for both types of materials. With regard to measurement methods, it may not matter what the source of particles is - we will probably use the same methods. But, it is still very difficult to make appropriate measures. And I think there are two problems here.
The one problem is that nobody is quite sure what we should be measuring. And the one thing we do know about engineered nanomaterials is that their structure is very important. Now whether that’s looking at particle surface area or particle shape or something else, we are not sure. We do know that it’s very difficult to develop measurement methods which are sensitive to structure. Especially if you take particles in the air, it’s very difficult to measure their surface area. So we haven’t carried out enough detailed research developing appropriate methods to do that yet.
NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) and HSE (Health and Safety Executive)
Q: You have experience working in the health and safety institutes both in UK and USA. Would you tell us a little bit about activities of NIOSH and HSE?
I can say less about HSE, because it’s a number of years since I have worked there. NIOSH is a research agency in the US. They’re not the regulatory agency. So their mission is to develop necessary information to promote safe workplaces. They recognize that if we are going to have safe workplaces as this technology develops, we’ve got to understand what the risk is and how to reduce that risk. They are also aware that nanotechnology potentially offers some very unique ways of ensuring the safety of people. So for instance, with either developing new sensors or new control methods or even new processes, it’s a technology which could be used to make workplaces safer places. At the moment, NIOSH has got a research program that’s looking at the toxicity of engineered nanomaterials. They have a research program that’s
looking at characterization and measurement of exposure. They have recently released guidelines for public comments on safe ways or appropriate ways of working with engineered nanomaterials. They’re working on best practice guidelines. And most recently, they’ve started putting together teams of people that go into industry and evaluate potential exposure and potential risky materials. They are beginning to work with industry to address these issues. That is what NIOSH is doing at the moment.
Now if you go to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the UK, you will find that they do a lot of work with a government research laboratory, the Health and Safety Laboratory. They have clearly stated that they see engineered nanomaterials, especially nanometer size particles, as a potential health risk that needs to be addressed in workplace. So they are working out how to control potentially harmful exposures.
Guideline for dealing with nanoparticles in laboratory and standard materials
Q: Some Japanese have heard a couple of times that NIOSH will announce the guideline for dealing with nanoparticles in laboratory.
I think the current draft publications from NIOSH are as close as you are going to get, certainly in the near future. A part of the problem is that, at the moment, there is not enough information to develop concrete guidelines. All the agencies, such as NIOSH, can do is to present people with available information and encourage them to develop their own appropriate guidelines. If you are waiting for something very clear to come out from agencies, like NIOSH, you may be waiting for long time. But, there are numbers of other organizations that are trying to do the same. For instance, if you look at the standard organizations, ASTM and ISO, they are trying to put something together which will help people develop appropriate ways, safe ways, for working with nanomaterials.
Q: You told me before that you had difficulties to obtain standard materials. What’s the situation now?
I don’t think it has changed very much. It’s still a major issue. I’ll expand on what’s the important issue. The biggest challenge, I think, with understanding the hazard of engineered nanomaterials, is the dependency of any potential impact on the structure of those materials. And this is something which the hazard community hasn’t
really had to deal with before. They have a poor understanding of the importance of structure and also surface chemistry or structural chemistry. And they haven’t fully realized yet that you can have many different materials which are chemically the same, but structurally very different. That’s really left a challenge with what you use as a benchmark for your studies.
In the past, you had studies on titanium dioxide or carbon nanotubes, and people assumed that they’ve been dealing with the same material, but they haven’t. The only way that you can get around that is by having a benchmark material, standard material, that people use in these tests. We are still some way from actually having those standard test materials and having the agreement of research community that they will use those as benchmark materials. But there is a second problem here as well. That is our ability to identify a good source of material. Even with something like carbon nanotubes, you have two manufacturers supposedly producing the same materials, and they are subtly different. And those differences would possibly lead to differences in toxicity.
Q: Not only materials, but also methods of dispersion into air or water are different.
That’s right. That makes things even harder. I give you an example. How the material gets into a body is very important. And as an example, we did some work at NIOSH on carbon nanotubes and aerosolization of these nanotubes. We took two batches of a particular material, supposedly of the same material, and formed an aerosol from the materials obtained from the two batches. One material released particles smaller than 30 nanometers in diameter. The other material did not. So even if the physical and chemical properties of the two materials were the same, the nature of the material delivered in an airborne state would have been completely different.
Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center
Q: We will change the subject a little bit. You have moved to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. What is your main job now?
I’m the Chief Science Advisor on a relatively new project there. At first, I have to tell you a little bit about the Woodrow Wilson Center. The Woodrow Wilson Center is an organization that was set up by the US Congress in 1968, to commemorate President Woodrow Wilson in the US. It was set up as an independent center of dialogue where you can bring in people from different areas to discuss, maybe, difficult issues in an independent forum. Now within this structure, we have the project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, which was started last year in conjunction with The Pew Charitable Trusts in the US.
The aim of this project is to examine some of the issues associated with nanotechnologies which may lead to issues or problems over the next ten or twenty years,
and to bring people to the table to discuss and work out how we can overcome these potential problems to make nanotechnology succeed. And all this is done in an independent environment where we can bring in different stakeholders to the table. That is the aim of the project. Now, clearly to do that, we have an interest in policy as well as science. So my role within the project is to bring a science perspective to the work we do, to try to understand the current science and understand current issues from a science perspective, and then to inform the policy recommendations that are made, and also to insure that any debate that is carried out is scientifically sound as well as directed at appropriate issues.
The “Managing the Effects of Nanotechnology” report * and regulation
Q: Would you give us some outline of the report, “Managing the Effects of Nanotechnology”?
This is the report by Terry Davies. Where does nanotechnology stand with regulation, specifically in the US? Is the current regulatory structure robust enough to deal with emerging nanotechnologies? Does it need to be adapted to deal with nanotechnology? We commissioned this independent report from Terry Davies to examine some of the issues and see where he went with it. As he began to look at current regulation, mainly in EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), he came to the conclusion himself that the current regulatory structure has got some very significant holes in it, when it comes to nanotechnology. And he came to his own conclusion that the most appropriate way forward, if we are going to see good regulation which is going to actually encourage nanotechnology, is to come up with new nanotechnology specific legislation. He felt that there are areas where existing laws weren’t strong enough and we needed new laws, having said that one of the big aims of this piece of work was to just start people talking about these issues. We want to make sure that if new regulation is required, people are talking about it now, and so when it’s needed, it’s there.
Q: Regarding the application or limitation of existing regulatory system, I think, the NEHI (Nanotechnology Environmental and Health Implications) Working Group is also discussing these subjects.
My information is out of date now. I used to co-chair the NEHI Working Group within the National Technology Initiative. While I was there, we went through a process of asking the different regulatory agencies to examine what their position was on nanotechnology. And in most cases, the message coming back from these agencies was that they believed that the legislative framework was robust enough to deal with nanomaterials.
One thing that Terry did do in this report is, he highlighted one or two areas where there seems to be big deficiencies in current legislation. He acknowledged that in areas, such as chemical manufacturing, with TSCA (Toxic Substances Control Act), things seem to be reasonably secure. But in other areas, such as cosmetics for instance, regulation is really very poor at protecting people. Something has to go seriously wrong before regulation is effective at correcting a problem. And so it was areas like that that he said there’s a real need for new regulation, if we are going to see people protected.
International collaboration
Q: Finally, of course we are very interested in international collaboration. Would you comment something on that?
I think it’s absolutely essential. You have an issue of environmental safety and health in nanotechnology which I don’t believe should be seen as giving anybody a competitive advantage. I think it’s in everybody’s interest to be as open as possible and as collaborative as possible in addressing these issues. After all, if nanotechnology affects the environment and people’s
health, it’s a global issue. And I think that we need to work in partnership globally to address that issue.
There are also very practical issues here. There is never going to be an enough research funding in any one country to really fully understand these issues. And it makes a lot of sense to collaborate as much as possible between countries to pool our resources, which will help every country develop good nanotechnology. I would encourage international collaboration as much as possible, not only between governments, but also between industries. I think it’s everybody’s interest to see that collaboration.
Q: Thank you very much.
(Interviewer: Masahiro Takemura, nanonet)
* “Managing the Effects of Nanotechnology” by L. Clarence Davies
URL: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/events/docs/Effectsnanotechfinal.pdf 
- “Nanotechnology: A Research Strategy for Addressing Risk”, a new report by Dr. Andrew MAYNARD in July, 2006, proposes a comprehensive framework for systematically exploring nanotechnology's possible risks.
URL: http://www.nanotechproject.org/file_download/77
