Good morning.
My name is Nils Petersen. I did not prepare a formal brief for you, but I would like to just give you a brief background on myself and then also make three points.
I'm a physical chemist. I run an institute in Edmonton called the National Institute for Nanotechnology, where we currently have about 350 people working on various aspects of nanotechnology, all the way from applications in energy to applications in health and ICT, information communications technology, and biomaterials.
The three points I'd like to make are the following. First, nanotechnology is inevitable. It is something we cannot get away from, I think, and I'll speak a little bit more to it in a moment. The second point is that it will be everywhere. It's going to be pervasive. The third point I'd like to make is that while scale is an extraordinarily important component of nanotechnology, it is not the only component. I think we need to understand that when we deal with the risk aspect of it.
Why is it inevitable? It's inevitable because it is a new way of thinking from a scientific perspective. It is a new way of looking at creating new materials, designing new constructs, and thinking about the convergence of chemistry, physics, and biology in medicine and in all of the different disciplines we can think about. We are now working with a different mindset of designing building materials from a molecular scale up to structures that we design so that they have a particular functionality. It is a different way of thinking, and I think it is therefore also becoming very exciting for many people. I think it will be inevitable that we will be using that kind of thinking as we go forward.
It's going to be everywhere, because it is a platform; it is not an industry in its own right, it is a technology that can be applied in a number of different areas. We see it already in applications in energy fields, where we have catalysts that provide better utilization of oil. We have structures of surfaces of pipes that are making them more corrosion- and wear-resistant. We have in the environmental areas sensors that are detecting small amounts of other kinds of pollutants. We are seeing it in the health area as drug delivery mechanisms. We are seeing it as diagnostic tools. So we're seeing it in all kinds of different areas. We can therefore expect having a very complex environment in which to think about this kind of technology.
The third point is that it is not just about scale. It is clear that we think about nanotechnology as something in the order of 100 nanometers or less. That has a particular significance for some of us as scientists because it is bigger than the molecular scale and smaller than many of the things we normally have been working with. What's particularly important about this is that at that scale we start seeing new properties. It is not just because of the size. There is no magic number that will say the properties will appear at 100 nanometers, or 50 nanometers, or whatever. It is basically a scale at which we can think about materials having different kinds of properties. I'll give you an example. If you take a metal like gold and you melt it, it will melt at a particular temperature. When it gets very small, all of a sudden it will melt at a much lower temperature, and that's because the surface volume ratio changes quite significantly. We'll continue to see surprising and different kinds of properties.
All of this comes to the conclusion that when we think about risk management, we do not think about it as something we manage by saying “anything less than 100 nanometers we need to worry about”. We need to worry about each of the different applications and each of the different products in a different way. It doesn't make it easier. It makes it a lot more complex. But I think it's important that we think about this area from a product perspective rather than from a scale perspective. Unfortunately, there have been jurisdictions around the world where people have been thinking about trying to do regulation or whatever based simply on scale. I think that's the wrong path.
I'll leave it at that.