I think there are probably a couple of issues here – understanding why something is done in the way that it is, and understanding the dangers of mis-framing a piece of research. For example, a study using high doses might offer insight into specific modes of action within biological systems, while not being designed to shed light on toxicity. If the study is either evaluated as a toxicity study, or promoted as such, there is a great deal of room for misunderstanding.

How you deal with this, beyond making it very clear what the context of the research was, I’m not sure.

In my case, this article made me think that very often those studies (as you have commented above) use very high concentrations of NPs/chemicals to get a measurable effect. Althought this might obvious for a scientist, the “public” struggles in understanding the role of dose (and exposure) in those studies. I dealt in the past with NGOs and in their talks they gave for granted that toxicological studies use concentrations of NPs to which people would be likely to be exposed to. This si a big knowledge gap! What can we do to fill the gap? Is it totally unrealistic to ask that reseachers doing these experiment to always do a “real-life” control experiment with a more realistic dose? Maybe more a comment then a question…

Luisa

There was surprisingly little difference in response between the nano- and micro- particles, or between the two different doses (whether using small or large particles, or ions) – which I find worrying from an experimental design perspective.

Something that is reasonably common in research like this is that you use large quantities of material to give you a measurable effect. It’s an approach that can provide insight into biological mechanisms, but the results are often hard to relate to real-world conditions without further research.

I think the good news here is that the more we know about how materials like nanoparticles and metal ions interact with biological systems, the better positioned we are to use these interactions for good, and avoid inadvertently causing harm.

How strange that the quantities used in this study should have been so large. It’s as if the researchers were going on a premise similar to ‘our bodies absorb Vitamin D from sunshine and we need Vitamin D, so let’s see what happens when we give people 24 hours a day of sunshine rather than just the 10-20 minutes one needs to get one’s recommended daily dose.’