The Safety of Nanotechnology

This article gives an assessment of the prospects and potential problems of nanotechnology. The two dominant areas of large-scale application for nanotechnology are likely to be in information and communications technologies (ICT) and in medicine. The most disturbing aspects of the nano area at present are (a) the rapidly increasing evidence that certain kinds of nanofibres and nanoparticles may be highly toxic to biological systems, coupled with (b) the lack of quantitative methods for the detection, identification and characterisation of nanoparticles, and for studying their interaction with the environment