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International standards have a crucial role in supporting global trade and protecting human health and the environment. US government agencies and the private sector must become more involved in international efforts to establish such standards, and representatives from all nations must ensure that all standards are based on sound science.
A new technology will only be successful if those promoting it can show that it is safe, but history is littered with examples of promising technologies that never fulfilled their true potential and/or caused untold damage because early warnings about safety problems were ignored. The nanotechnology community stands to benefit by learning lessons from this history.
Scientists often invoke comparisons with nature when discussing developments in nanotechnology, but the relationship between the two is more complex than it first appears, and can be broken down into nine different narratives.
Nanomedicine offers new opportunities to fight diseases but a global effort is needed to safely translate laboratory innovation to the clinic. Seven priority areas have been identified for this endeavour.
An analysis of 30 years of data on patent publications from the US Patent and Trademark Office, the European Patent Office and the Japan Patent Office confirms the dominance of companies and selected academic institutions from the US, Europe and Japan in the commercialization of nanotechnology.
The enormous difference in scale between our everyday world and the nanoworld could explain why so few members of the general public seem to know about nanotechnology.
The increasing emphasis on commercialization and market forces in modern universities is fundamentally at odds with core academic principles. Publicly funded academics have an obligation to carry out science for the public good, and this responsibility is not compatible with the entrepreneurial ethos increasingly expected of university research by governments and funding agencies.
