One of the first efforts to get parties round the table to discuss nanotechnology has got off to a faltering start, after leading environmental groups declined to take part.

The International Council on Nanotechnology (ICON) has been set up to drive open discussion about the benefits and pitfalls of the field, which comprises a clutch of technologies involving materials and components on the scale of a billionth of a metre. The council held its first meeting on 28 October at Rice University in Houston, Texas, which has strong research programmes in the implications of nanotechnology.

But the three main environmental groups invited to participate said they were not ready to do so, complaining that the council was likely to be biased because it depended on industry funds.

Jennifer Sass of the National Resources Defense Council and Scott Walsh of Environmental Defense, both based in Washington DC, and Pat Mooney of the Canadian ETC Group, based in Ottawa, all turned down invitations to join ICON. Walsh and Mooney participated in last week's meeting as guests.

Researchers and industrial backers of nanotechnology hope that discussion of its effects will help avoid the public mistrust that has plagued fields such as agricultural biotechnology.

“We welcome anyone who thinks they have a stake in this discussion,” says Kristen Kulinowski, director for education and public policy at Rice's Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology, which manages ICON. Kulinowski says the council discussed how to make its decision-making truly independent of its funding sources.

Sass would prefer the council to be publicly funded. Mooney says he would join if ICON included more members from the academic world, from trade unions and from developing countries.

But academic members say the current arrangements are satisfactory. “I'm not concerned about industry sponsorship,” says Günter Oberdörster, a toxicologist at the University of Rochester in New York, who studies nanoparticles. “I am concerned about non-governmental organizations possibly not being part of it,” he says. “We should find the answer together, in a transparent process.”

William Provine, a council member who tracks nanotechnology applications for DuPont, the chemicals company based in Wilmington, Delaware, agrees. “We need to establish a credible group of stakeholders,” he says, “and we have not gotten there, yet.”