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Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

What no one seems to think about is the potential health consequences of this application of nanotech.

This is basically something made with particles that are much smaller than your cells. The material can probably get into your body by osmosis alone. Will the materials affect your body? Cause cancer? Get stuck in your lungs? Do something else that we don't know? There has been very little research on this area, and the little research that has been done is worrying. Putting this in consumer products is a very large and uncontrolled experiment.

We should be careful of starting to use materials like these with no further study or testing. There is a risk we might end up looking like the guys who brushed their teeth with radium or used a portable x-ray video machine to examine their kids' feet at the shoe store.

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I agree with the call for caution regarding nanotech safety in general.

Firstly, as a technical nitpick, osmosis by definition is the diffusion of water across semi-permeable membranes. Stuff that is not water cannot move by osmosis. What you are worried about is stuff like the coating being able to just diffuse through your skin.

That said, having trawled through the companies literature [1], they actually only claim micron scale particles. For reference, your cells are typically 70-100 microns in diameter, so these particles are still comparatively huge. They are likely larger than most bacteria you will see.

Furthermore, since they are both hydro and fat phobic, they'd almost certainly have a very hard time diffusing your your skin, since your live cells have membranes made of (basically) fat, and then enclose a space that is mostly water.

[1] http://www.spillcontainment.com/sites/default/files/FDA%20an...

Excellent points, and well explained. People who are smarter and more knowledgeable than I are certainly better qualified to put context around the significance of nano-tech. Regardless, It seems as though we are at or near a new nano-technology frontier.

I confess to knowing absolutely zero about it, but I also think the possibilities are fascinating, and worthy of both tremendous skepticism and awe at the same time.

It is a better approach when one knows nothing of a subject to rather ask questions than make statements (bordering on sensationalism). I don't disagree that one needs to be skeptical.

From Wikipedia: "Osmosis is the net movement of solvent molecules through a partially permeable membrane into a region of higher solute concentration, in order to equalize the solute concentrations on the two sides." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmosis)

From dictionary.com: " the tendency of a fluid, usually water, to pass through a semipermeable membrane into a solution where the solvent concentration is higher, thus equalizing the concentrations of materials on either side of the membrane." (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/osmosis?s=t)

Wouldn't that include solvents other than water?

Yes, you're correct. That said, in biological systems, water as the solvent is pretty much a given.

Nanoparticles would be the solute in this case. (If a foreign substance, and not water, were the solvent, you'd have problems regardless of how tiny the solent's particles were.)

> The material can probably get into your body by osmosis alone.

Correction: only water can get into a cell through osmosis; the term you're looking for is actually passive transport.

Apart from semantics, nanoparticles are known to cause serious health problems. Asbestos fibers, which are very thin and on the same scale as the nanosilicate shown here, have been all over the news for causing cancer due to disruption of normal cell activity. Fiberglass, which is insulation made of very thin silica fibers, can cause lung problems.

Although I do think nanotechnology can have some benevolent effects in the future (think about this: what if tiny, very tiny nano-cells entered the bloodstream, and attached onto cancerous cells and killed them? The possibilities are so vast) the tech just isn't there yet in terms of health safety.

Before I studied the history the use of asbestos as an industrial material, I didn't take warnings like this seriously. Now I do.

Exactly.

See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=carbon-nano... for evidence that carbon nanotubes duplicate the dangers of asbestos. And the duplication is by mechanical means - so a large collection of machines around the same size is likely to cause similar effects on our lungs.

While you are absolutely correct that nanoparticles need to be used with caution, it might be difficult for a superhydrophobic particle to enter a body that it is so repulsed by. But I can imagine them being quite harmful when they nevertheless find a way in.

An interesting consideration: testing potentially harmful products on the public is done with many technologies. I am guessing the public benefits from this often enough to justify continuing the practice. Compare this "easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" style to the public utility lost by performing rigorous governmental approval and costly testing of the likes that pharmaceutics pass through before market entry.

It may be that the only cure for nanotech is more nanotech -- once the genie is out of the bottle. That doesn't mean we have to go down that road.

"x-ray video machine to examine their kids' feet at the shoe store"

Except there's no real evidence this ever hurt anyone?

And xrays are an incredible medical marvel that has saved millions of lives.

Fear hurts more than it ever helps, if they had delayed xrays for even a few years imagine how many more deaths there would have been.

The precautionary principle is a dangerous idea that has somehow has gotten mainstream acceptance. It regularly kills people, people somehow think it's a safe concept when it's not.

You're posing a false dichotomy, in that we either use X-rays for everything, or nothing. Using X-rays for medical imaging is worth the risk, using them to try on shoes isn't.

Consequently, using this material to avoid getting your boots soaked and freezing to death on a mountain might be worth the risk, but using it on your coat isn't.

The truth is that, indeed, we don't know the health risks. Fear has saved more lives than taken, I suspect.

Through the magic of hind-site you can claim there is no dichotomy.

xrays could have given cancer to the people conducting the treatments. Using fear, xrays should have never been used for anything.

Is it worth the risk that doctors using xrays might get cancer to save some patients?

Is it worth the risk of giving a patient cancer just because they might have a 10% chance of a life threatening injury.

If you look at all clichéd stuffups with technology their kill rates are tiny, often like DDT they saved many many lives.

Now take all the things people get scared of - TV, Mobile phones, electricity towers, chemicals(What ever this means).

Mobile phones perhaps should only be used for emergencies in case they are cancer causing. Imaging how many 3rd world people would die if we made the decision.

Apart from the radium toothpaste and giving kids in development unnecessary, dangerously large radiation doses, you have a point about excessive caution being problematic.

But there is a NIMBY-like concern here: I don't want to be in the early adopter group of a technology like this unless my life depends on it. Others are free to go ahead as they choose, and it is nice if this quickly reveals the picture of danger and helps create beneficial technology. But I won't be on the bleeding edge of this development.

I guess my point is that there is a middle ground between jumping in headfirst (radium on your teeth, nano-coating on your cutlery) and being excessively careful and always covering your ass (contemporary life-saving experimental medical treatments).

> Except there's no real evidence this ever hurt anyone?

According to Wikipedia, "monitoring of American salespersons found dose rates at pelvis height of up to 95 R/week, with an average of 7.1 R/week. (Up to ~50 mSv/yr, avg ~3.7 mSv/yr effective dose) A 2007 paper suggested that even higher doses of 0.5 Sv/yr were plausible." There were a number of cases affecting salespeople that were linked to the use of shoe-fitting fluoroscopes.

OP was criticizing irresponsible use of X-rays, not dismissing X-rays altogether. Given what we know about X-rays today, shoestore fluoroscopes seem an incredibly bad idea in hindsight. And given what we know about nanoparticles today, this nanotech seems like an incredible bad idea right now. Not bad enough to ban, but bad enough to regulate.

The precautionary principle has kept us alive for millions of years.

Excessive use of X-rays and CT exposure have been linked to increased cancers, especially in occupational contexts. That's why there are safety protocols when you get an x-ray.

I'm sure the safety standards at a shoe store were less than robust.

This is a very valid point. There could be a risk that we will pollute our environment with nano particles that we can't get rid of, that will not break down due to their physical properties, and that accumulate inside us over time.

> something made with particles that are much smaller than your cells

Nearly everything we come into contact with during the day is made from particles smaller than our cells...

Like what? Mostly air, water, carbohydrate/fat/protein/vitamins, and toxins.

Ah yes, the seven classical elements.

I just mean that our cells are very large, compared to what other materials are made of.

How about bleach? Sand? Dirt? Soap? Lotion? Bug spray? Makeup? Our skin is a pretty good barrier. Not saying that this stuff is safe, of course, but I don't think you can say it's unsafe because it's made of molecules that are small.

I think the concern isn't over particles that are just smaller than our cells; it's over particles that are _significantly_ smaller that our skin cells.

The idea being the particles have to be small enough to diffuse across the cell membrane to be a concern. Something half the size of a cell is going to have a very hard time permeating a cell membrane.

That send, another commenter (far more knowledgable on the topic than I) above points out that these aren't actually nano-scale particles. They are roughly on the same scale as a cell, and thus your point may hold in this context.

toxins

... maybe it is time to say goodbye to HN after all.

> and the little research that has been done is worrying.

reference?

See any study on micro- particulate matter.

Good point. One of the recent Duke Startup Challenge winners was a company called Nanoly, which is developing a nanoparticle shield for vaccines, so that they can be delivered without refrigeration and safely. According to their website, they are careful to mention that they are using non-toxic nanoparticles, which makes sense as their work is health-centric.

I think that it is prudent to evaluate the safety of any new material, not just nanotech. I don't think that there is any risk to this material vs. any other new substance that is created.

I'd think practical uses right now without health risks:

Car window treatment. Basically you won't really need wipers anymore.

Glasses. Basically you won't need to clean them ever, except to rinse them using water to get dust out.

I won't go with cellphone screens because that has the risk of ingestion. But monitors yes.

a coating on shoes and worker's gloves. Cement mixers.

Those all come with huge health risks.

Coating millions of cars, computer monitors and clothes means hundreds of gallons of this solution being applied in warehouses all over the country. Disposal alone is a huge concern. What happens when it is time to throw away those boots? What happens when there's an accident and suddenly all of this stuff is now connected to bits of glass on the highway?

Hell, what happens when a truck carrying this stuff gets in a collision and suddenly a few thousand gallons of it is spilling down a city street?

It's a really cool demo but it makes me think of the times we used to spray swimming holes with DDT or build houses with asbestos... I feel it'll be a few years after mass production then we'll have the next big "Radium Girls" story.

At least the other video they have explains taking safety precautions during application: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-WNb0NLSTI

this depends entirely on what the nanoparticles are composed of.

gold nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes are materials known as being very active and toxic in certain living systems, and the sort of thing that you describe as having very little research.

metal oxide nanoparticles (entirely likely in a superhydrophobic/oleophobic product) on the other hand, we have ample, ample research on, because volcanoes have been spewing them out of millions of years and we've been breathing them in.

Are you referring to the rather astonishing suggestion in the headline, or the use of this technology in general?

I think I know the answer but it still makes a big difference.

just wait 20 or 30 years when we found an island floating in the middle of the ocean, made of derbis from this product.

the video said it creates an air barrier so I think it would be a flying island, which is much cooler.

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