Nanotechnology has huge potential to provide us with new cures for cancer, more efficient solar cells, and even quicker and smaller computers, but there are also risks – and no one can really say whether these risks are enormous, or quite small. Nils-Eric Sahlin, an ethics researcher at Lund University, Sweden, said, “The difficulty with this risk assessment is that we don’t know how much we don’t know. There are major gaps in our knowledge.” Current applications of this emerging technology include many “trivial” products, such as shoe sprays, car paints, and anti-wrinkle creams, but around the corner, await more important applications like better cancer drugs, more efficient solar cells, new catalytic converters, and cheaper and more energy efficient nano-LEDs. “Therefore you cannot be just for or against nanotechnology. It offers enormous possibilities, but also applications that appear completely superfluous”, said Sahlin. Knut Deppert, the director of Lund’s Engineering Nanoscience programme at the Faculty of Engineering, for his part, views many of the sunscreens and anti-wrinkle creams with nanoparticles as unnecessary and perhaps inappropriate, calling them “a large-scale experiment with many participants.” Lars Samuelson, Lund’s most internationally renowned nano-researcher, said he sees nanoparticles from traffic as a clear health risk, but calls nano-creams a conceivable risk. “But in the past there was not the awareness there is today. Now major scientific conferences are being held on the possible risks of nanotechnology, and there is a political will to develop a system of regulation for the field,” he said.
http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=24890&news_item=5682