Panicology

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  The more distant dream, or nightmare, of tiny robots using atoms and molecules as building blocks sounds worrying until you realize what an unbelievably difficult way of doing things it is. Nature has taken millions of years to get to the point where tiny cells are able to grow and divide. Thousands or millions of cells must do this continuously to grow a living organism. Yet to build one simple virus, to take a Crichtonesque example, atom by atom with each assembly operation taking just a second would take a week. Man has long found it more convenient to make things by manufacturing the chemical ingredients in bulk and then shaping them into parts which can be assembled into a product. The nanotechnologist’s dream is to turn this process on its head: your home might have a kind of programmable manufacturing appliance into which you would simply load some generic raw material and out would pop the latest model of mobile phone, or a Prada handbag, or a pristine copy of Prey.

  The central fear about nanotechnology is that there are, as the Observer put it, ‘no new rules’. But need there be? Old rules may suffice in many cases. Beneath the noise of all the breast-beating, this is in fact how the regulatory drive begins to sound. A 2004 report from the British Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering recommended that nanomaterials ought to be regulated as for new chemicals. Berkeley’s nanotechnology ordinance, now approved, simply requires companies to disclose the toxicology – to the extent that it is known – of nanoparticles as they must already for bulk hazardous materials.

  Some nanoparticles may indeed prove to be harmful – it would be a surprise if none did. Nanofibres may behave like asbestos fibres. Nanomaterials slathered on the skin may be absorbed and have harmful effects. Like diesel exhaust particulates, nanoparticles in the air may enter the lungs. A more immediate concern may be the escape into the environment of hard-to-recover silver nanoparticles from discarded appliances. The Times’s apologist was thus somewhat overenthusiastic in his denunciation of the nanotechnology critics who supposedly threaten to bring the whole edifice of scientific progress crashing to the ground: of course, ‘real defects’ do need to be addressed, and this technology, like all others, will have to be brought under ‘social control’. It increasingly looks as if the way this might be done is when somebody brings the first lawsuit.

  Perhaps then we will know where to direct our distrust. When the Magic Nano cleaning product was withdrawn from the market, American newspapers reported on German officials’ caution in assessing the problem. The assumption was that the cause of the alleged breathing difficulties was the aerosol vapour produced when using the cleaner, although ‘they could not rule out whether the nano particles it contained also contributed’.6 After tests by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, however, Magic Nano was found to contain no nanoparticles at all. Consumers should perhaps worry less about new technologies and more about trading standards.

  Exposed

  ‘Nuked’ Daily Mirror

  In so many ways, it was made for the media. A former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, is admitted to hospital exhibiting symptoms of poisoning following a visit to a London sushi bar. At first, the speculation is that he has been given thallium. Then X-rays seem to show pieces of ‘dense matter’ inside his body, perhaps a canister that has broken open. Finally, his condition undergoes a sudden deterioration and he dies, but not before preparing a statement blaming the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, himself previously head of the nation’s secret service, for his death. The autopsy confirms that Litvinenko was killed by a large dose of radioactive polonium, a substance only likely to have been obtained with state sanction from a nuclear reactor. ‘NUKED’, screamed the front page of the Daily Mirror the next day, a Saturday.

  At this point the story abruptly changes gear. Now it is no longer just an intrigue. It is all of a sudden a ‘public health scare’.1 Over the weekend, the UK Health Protection Agency urges people who had been to the sushi bar on the day in question to contact a telephone helpline, though doctors insist they aren’t at any serious risk. ‘Hundreds of people face being tested for traces of deadly polonium,’ the Sunday Observer writes. By Monday, nearly 1,100 people have come forward. Eight are referred for tests – ‘at a secret London clinic’.2 The sushi bar is closed down for decontamination as other locations Litvinenko visited test positive for polonium 210. Traces of radiation are found in other places, including British Airways planes on the Moscow route. By the end of the week, the number of calls from the public is nudging 3,000; twenty-four are referred for tests.

  What made it such a perfect story? The suspicion of foul play – the conclusion drawn by British official reports. The exotic poisons – thallium features in a novel by Agatha Christie, while polonium cost its discoverer, Marie Curie, her life. The story unfolded in a gripping way, with each new morsel eagerly snapped up by a public with an appetite already sharpened for such incredible tales by the opening the same week of the latest James Bond film, Casino Royale.

  Above all, there was the dread word ‘radiation’, accompanied on the BBC news and in the tabloids by its spooky mandala. And, significantly, there was also the probability that, while all were excited by the drama, no reader was really at risk. This is because polonium 210 emits alpha particles, which have high energy but very short range. In Litvinenko’s body, the particles damaged his internal organs over a period of weeks, leading him to exhibit the series of puzzling symptoms that kept doctors guessing as to his illness, but could not penetrate beyond, explaining why radioactive poisoning was not identified sooner. He was finally buried in what the BBC Newsnight programme described reassuringly as a ‘radiation-proof coffin’, although an ordinary pine one would have done just fine.

  Alpha radiation does not spread through the environment. Contamination is therefore very limited. In the end the only people dangerously exposed to polonium were involved in the world of espionage. Sixteen other people received radiation doses of ‘some concern’, including some of the bar staff, where it is thought that the poison was administered. These people face a ‘very small’ raised risk of cancer in the long term, roughly equivalent to that if they were to live in Cornwall for a decade or two and be exposed to the high natural level of radiation from radon gas released from the local geology. There never was a risk to general ‘public health’.

  The Litvinenko episode was unprecedented in many ways, but it was not the only recent radiation scare. At the beginning of 2004, it was reported that American cities were being scanned for terrorist ‘dirty bombs’ – bombs combining radioactive material with conventional explosives that would spread radiation. In an attempt at reassurance, the newspapers conjured the unintentionally hilarious vision of scientists, ‘dressed casually to blend in with people enjoying the Christmas and New Year holidays’, roaming major American cities with golf bags weighed down with Geiger counters.3 Yet they would have detected nothing if the poisoned Litvinenko had walked right past them in the street. Extravagant precautions such as this, and the HPA’s offer to ‘worried’ members of the British public to call the hotline, are signs of a desperate urge to reassure far more than they are realistic means of damage limitation.

  Radiation generally invokes fear regardless of its nature, origin or potency. During the polonium scare, the Observer noted that ‘The last radioactivity incident of this magnitude occurred when the radiation plume from Chernobyl swept over Britain in 1986.’ Yet that event was quite different in all of these qualities. Why does radiation inspire such terror? In The Perception of Risk, Paul Slovic suggests that part of the fear stems from ‘transmutation’.4 Polonium is transmuted to lead when it emits its alpha particle, for example. Like the mutation of viruses that also makes us uneasy, transmutation is change of a kind we cannot readily comprehend. But what we fear most is surely the knowledge – one of the few things we do know about it – that radiation causes cancer.

  This is true both of nuclear radiation, which involves the emission of particles or rays from radioactive material, and of some forms of
electromagnetic radiation. Ignorance of the precise facts, however, means that we are indiscriminate when it comes to assessing radiation risks. We are apt to judge the risk not according to its physical nature but according to the context in which we experience it. Thus, we judge X-rays safe (which experts warn is not the case) and the hazard from nuclear power plants high when experts insist it is low. We may be agitated when manufacturers irradiate our food in order to destroy bacteria, but we regard radon leaking from the ground into our homes with ‘apathy’ because it is a natural occurrence.5

  Excessive reassurance may be the contemporary response to potential nuclear radiation hazards, but in the past it has often been excessive denial. This provides one further reason why our fears persist. Early nuclear accidents at Windscale (later renamed Sellafield) and near Detroit were downplayed in a time still marked by collective optimism about a clean, modern source of energy. The meltdown of a reactor and release of radioactive gas in 1979 at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania was less serious than either of these events, but by this time the environmental movement had sprung up, highlighting the issue of radioactive waste disposal as well as plant safety, and the tide of public opinion turned.

  This accident was overshadowed on 26 April 1986 when a reactor failed at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine, leading to a chemical explosion in which much of the 190 tonnes of nuclear fuel escaped into the atmosphere. The radioactive rain that drifted westward over Europe and beyond contained perhaps 100 times the fallout from the Hiroshima bomb. The disaster put the brakes on nuclear power globally and is still the cause of massive controversy.

  Did just fifty people die as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and World Health Organization (WHO) insist? Or was the figure 10,000 times that, more like half a million, as is now claimed by authorities in the Ukraine, a figure many times greater than maximum estimates given elsewhere?

  The World Nuclear Association, an industry lobby group, puts the Chernobyl death toll at ‘31+’, limiting the count to those who died in the immediate blast or from acute radiation within a year and omitting all subsequent radiation deaths. It thoughtfully offers a comparison with deaths in coal mines since that date, which add up to more than 3,000, mostly in China, with another 2,000 or so deaths related to oil and gas extraction.6 But the IAEA/WHO calculate that deaths from thyroid cancer due to radioactive iodine and other causes directly attributable to the Chernobyl explosion will ultimately be comparable with this total, at somewhere over 4,000.

  Chernobyl is now a destination for day-tripping tourists and home, if one is to believe the Sun, to ‘a generation of “mutant” super brainy children’. But, further west, it continues to leave its taint. The British government, in characteristic fashion, first denied there was a problem with radioactive fallout and then put in place restrictions on the sale and movement of sheep that were grazing contaminated grass. Eventually, the restriction zone was narrowed, oddly enough to a small area ‘just downwind from the huge international Sellafield nuclear reprocessing complex’, a site already notorious for radiation leaks.7 According to Brian Wynne of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change at nearby Lancaster University, scientists originally claimed that the radiation was entirely due to Chernobyl, but later admitted that half of it came from ‘other sources’, namely Sellafield itself and atmospheric weapons testing. Today, sheep graze the contaminated grass without restriction.

  Public response to electromagnetic radiation is less understandable. Electromagnetic radiation includes radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet and X-rays. Only the last two of these are sufficiently energetic to produce the chemical changes in biological molecules necessary to cause cancer. Yet many people are more worried about the low-energy electromagnetic radiation from electrical appliances.

  This fear was fuelled by a series of New Yorker articles on microwaves by Paul Brodeur, expanded in a book called The Zapping of America (1977). Brodeur returned to the magazine in the 1980s to give power lines the same treatment. On both occasions, he built his case on anecdotal evidence of ‘clusters’ of cancers, miscarriages, birth defects and childhood leukaemia.

  Misleadingly using the terminology of nuclear radiation, Brodeur claimed that levels of electromagnetic radiation in New York City were a hundred million times the ‘natural’ background. This is like pointing out that light levels in Times Square at night are this much higher than ‘natural’. The abundance of something harmless is of little consequence. Nevertheless, the widespread scare that Brodeur’s articles provoked nearly stifled the infant microwave oven industry, while public protests prevented the National Weather Service from installing a weather radar on Long Island. As Robert Park put it in Voodoo Science, ‘people feared the known dangers of howling wind and crashing ocean waves less than they feared the unproven hazard of silent, invisible microwaves’.8 The adjectives are significant here: it is the familiar, palpable danger that we downplay in favour of the novel and imperceptible.

  Extensive reviews of the evidence by the US National Academy of Sciences in 1996 and the National Cancer Institute the following year found no correlation between the claimed cause and effect. Even a ‘cluster’ of five children with leukaemia at the heart of the controversy was too small to have significance – it was random bad luck, not a correlation with anything. The two reports should have put the matter to rest. However, the story persists.

  The fundamental flaw in the argument of those who believe that fields of any sort are the cause of their complaint is something called the inverse square law. This says that if you double your distance from a radiation source your exposure is reduced by a factor of four. So if you worry about the 10,000 volts surging through the power lines 10 metres overhead, you should also consider the 240 volts in the cable running by your desk and the 12-volt electric toothbrush in your hand.

  It seems that some people are doing just that. ‘Electrosensitivity’ is a growing complaint. Sufferers experience headaches, skin irritation and fatigue. The symptoms may be real enough. But have they correctly identified the cause? Or is it a case of mistaken attribution as with some claimed allergies? As with power lines, much expensive research has been commissioned to find out.

  The current focus of the debate is mobile phone technology and the suspicion that the microwave signals that pass between the hand-held receiver and the nearest phone mast may cause brain damage. The argument is superficially plausible because people hold the devices against the side of their head. But again, as with power lines, no evidence solidly supports a connection. It is impossible to prove a negative, however, and so doubts persist, and, as the Financial Times warned, with around 2 billion users, ‘even a tiny individual health risk could translate into thousands of deaths’.

  The HPA, which reviewed the available studies in 2000 and again in 2005, confusingly concluded that while the ‘balance of evidence’ indicated no effect on health, there was some evidence for ‘biological effects’.9 Good news, then, both for the complacent and the worried. The latter evidence comes from small-scale studies involving volunteers, and the cause of the effects is unclear. In a sign of the times, the HPA nevertheless advised a precautionary approach, echoed by the WHO. Such advice shows how official agencies are increasingly taking into account not only scientific evidence but also the vagaries of public opinion, evidence-based or not.

  A larger study by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has since shown that long-term phone users appear to have a greater chance of developing a particular nerve tumour. What made these results compelling was that the tumours appeared on the side of the head where the user holds the phone. But again, cause and effect have not been unequivocally linked, and other large studies have not replicated the results. The effect may stem from older models of phone no longer in use, or from some other factor entirely.

  When computers began to enter the workplace in the 1980s, fears arose concerning the radiation from their visual displays. Research then – m
uch of it commissioned by trade unions and coming from socially liberal countries such as Canada and Sweden – led to sensible measures to improve workplace design and office lighting and to ensure that workers took regular breaks, although no radiation hazard was ever established.

  Computers were often imposed on workers who feared the loss of their jobs, but people mostly love their mobile phones. So this time around we might expect radiation fears to subside sooner. Nevertheless, the WHO estimates that $200 million has already been spent worldwide on research into the supposed dangers of mobile phones. As their usage expands, so the fears become more far-fetched. ‘Do mobile phones kill sperm?’, demanded one recent headline, reporting news that the Reproductive Research Center at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio found that men who used mobile phones had lower sperm counts.

  This study nicely illustrates some of the problems that arise with this sort of research. The sample comprised 364 men undergoing infertility diagnosis, hardly a typical group. They were divided into groups with high, medium and low sperm counts, and it was found that those who used a mobile for more than four hours a day were disproportionately likely to be in the low group. Ignored was the possibility that people with such a curious lifestyle might exhibit other traits which could better explain the results – poor diet, posture or working environment, for example. Furthermore, the researchers appear to have forgotten the inverse square law. Unless you have ears in your crotch, the radiation your testicles receive while using a mobile phone is less than from listening to your stereo. One other thing would explain the findings – talking bollocks.