Carbon nanotubes: dangerous or not? Claudia Sonea

If man is the master of technology, than technology will be destroyer of man. We enjoy developing and creating technologies, but sometimes the consequences lead to diseases that are fatal to us. In the beginning of the 19th century, asbestos was considered to be the most useful material due to its resistance to heat, electricity and chemical damage, and so on and so forth. However, later on it was discovered that the asbestos causes illnesses like cancer. That should have been a lesson to learn for people worldwide, you may think. Still, you would be wrong. They switched the interest in "nanotubes", a nanometer-scale tube-like structure made out of carbon and thought to have great use in medicine and industry. According to a study published on Tuesday in Nature Nanotechnology, a scientific journal, the nanotubes have properties similar to those of asbestos, thus we failed to avoid committing the same error once more. The study was conducted on mice and revealed that longer nanotubes caused inflammation and lesions just like the asbestos. This was considered by Andrew Maynard of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies as insufficient to prove there are actual risks. Even the authors of the research requested for more study because they failed in some ways to do it properly (they should have waited for a month or two in order to see the effects; the lesions were caused only by longer nanotubes, thus it might have no connection with their chemical properties). Nanotubes are usually pipes of graphite with minuscule shape used in electronics and medicine. A research made by Stanford University scientists that required mice to digest short carbon nanotubes showed nothing wrong has happened. All is a matter of proper investigation say some people. Let us hope we will not find out the truth after deaths are registered.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080520/ap_on_hi_te/nanotechnology_asbestos;_ylt=AiCZ8l4l_qV7WchqxcuybhCs0NUE

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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