In one of the more bizarre yet less publicized proposed cuts in the 2012 Obama budget, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Education and Research Centers are on the chopping block.  Bizarre, because the move is directly counter to Obama’s push on innovation and education as drivers of economic growth.

The Education and Research Centers (ERCs, previously called Educational Resource Centers) were originally established in the mid-1970′s, in direct response to the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act mandate to

“conduct, directly or by grants and contracts, education programs to provide an adequate supply of qualified personnel to carry out the purposes of this Act”

The aim was to support academic institutions in developing interdisciplinary occupational health and safety training programs that ensured health and safety professionals had the best possible training.

There are currently 17 ERCs in the US, each of them equipping occupational health professionals with a unique skill-set to support safe and effective business practices.  In the academic year 2009-2010, there were 689 graduate students enrolled in ERCs, of which, 423 (61%) were supported by NIOSH.  Over the same period 287 graduated from ERC training programs. Of those, 234 (82%) entered occupational safety and health careers or more advanced occupational safety and health training.

Without a doubt, this $24 million per year program hits way above its weight in ensuring US businesses remain competitive and sustainable.  And it does this by leveraging other resources, and by ensuring businesses do not making costly and unnecessary mistakes when it comes to health and safety.

But more than this, the ERCs have an essential role in ensuring US health and safety professionals are up to speed on the latest knowledge and tools for ensuring safe and effective work practices in an increasingly complex world.

Let’s face it – we’re no longer living in the 1900′s, where businesses could gamble on worker safety (and sometimes get away with it in the short term) and many safe working practices were grounded in common sense.  Today’s successful modern business demands highly skilled personnel to ensure safety contributes to success, and to ensure that enterprises don’t fail because someone was foolish enough to think safety doesn’t matter.

And no-where is this more apparent than at the cutting edge of technology innovation.

Technology innovation is critical to the US economy.  Yet if we’ve learned anything in recent times, it’s that if cutting edge innovation is to lead to jobs and economic growth, it has to be accompanied by cutting edge approaches to ensuring its safe development and use.  Technologies such as nanotechnology have taught us that new technologies demand new approaches to safe and responsible development.  This is a lesson that emerging technologies such as synthetic biology are re-enforcing.  And in today’s globalized world, corporations are increasingly realizing that sustainable development requires new value-sets and understanding that integrate safety into design and development in sophisticated ways.

And where is the expertise going to come from to achieve this?  The ERCs. Apart from the fact that they won’t be there in 18 months time if the proposed cuts are approved.

I can just see US competitors rubbing their hands in glee as they see the country’s shortsightedness eroding the foundations of its innovation strategy.

Of course, the ERCs aren’t the only source of occupational safety knowledge.  And as they stand, they will still need to develop and adapt to address emerging workplace safety needs.  But they are without a doubt a critical part of the US’s complex business and innovation structure, and their removal will have long-reaching repercussions to US innovation and competitiveness.

What is worse, it appears that the thinking behind their removal is more than a little sloppy.  The Pump Handle has already questioned the justification for killing the program.  And over on the Risk Science Blog there is a detailed rebuttal of poorly researched justifications made in the budget.

Which leaves the question – why cut a $24 million program that has proven its worth, and is probably more important to US growth and development now than at any time previously – especially where such a cut will be extremely costly to reverse once made?

It’s a question that I, and probably many others involved with making technology innovation work for Americans, are still trying to understand.

The unthinkable has happened!  The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is poised to get $5 million in crisp new dollars for researching possible workplace risks arising from nanotechnology.  It may not sound like a big deal.  But believe me—it is…

Back in 2005, NIOSH spent $3 million on nanotechnology risk research—scraped together from various internal sources.  It wasn’t a lot, but it allowed the agency to begin chipping away at a growing problem—how to work safely with the increasingly unusual materials coming out of nanotechnology.  Since then, NIOSH has been doing an annual loaves and fish trick—pushing meager internal funds further than they had any right to go in the pursuit of safer workplaces.

But even with inspired leadership and a smart bunch of researchers, $3 million a year was never enough to cover all of the research needed to underpin safe nanotech workplaces.  Back in 2005, we didn’t know how to measure exposure to nanomaterials, how toxic the new materials being produced were, how to prevent exposure, or how to work with and dispose of the materials safely.  Despite some excellent research, we are still a long way from answering these questions—which makes things tough for the producers, users and regulators of nanotechnology-related products.

Of course, the burden for filling in the knowledge gaps doesn’t lie solely on NIOSH’s shoulders.  Other federal agencies are filling in some of the unknowns under the auspices of the US National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI).  And collaborations with research partners around the world are helping leverage the limited funds that are available.

Nevertheless, NIOSH is the lead US agency when it comes to underpinning safe workplaces through sound research.  And so far it hasn’t had the resources necessary to do the job when it comes to nanotechnology.

Over the past five years, annual funding for nanotechnology risk research has increased within the agency—it was up to $7 million last year.  But this has always been achieved through redirecting internal funds.  Despite the US Government investing around $1.5 billion per year on nanotechnology research, not a drop of new money has gone NIOSH’s way.

Until now.  Maybe it’s the new administration.  Maybe people are eventually waking up to the fact that successful nanotechnology depends on safe workplaces.  Either way, NIOSH is scheduled to receive $5 million in new funding for nanotechnology risk research next year—bringing the total nanotech research budget to $12 million.

Of course, it isn’t enough to do everything that is necessary.  Even my lowest estimates suggest that the agency need an additional $10 million per year to make significant inroads into the research backlog here.

But it is a major step in the right direction.

That’s not the only good news though.  Browsing through the NNI’s Supplement to the President’s Budget for 2010 [PDF, 3.4MB], a number of agencies will be increasing spending on nanotechnology risk research next year.  Most significantly, the National Institute of Standards and Testing (NIST) will be investing an additional $3 million, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) an additional $7 million.  Overall, the projected budget for nanotechnology risk research for 2010 is $88 million—$16 million up on this year.

This is great news.  But I do need to add a caveat.  The NNI figures have always tended to encompass research that is relevant to addressing safety concerns, but isn’t necessarily directly focused on the type of research that is needed (this discrepancy was highlighted most recently in a National Academies of Science report).  And so there is a chance that not every dollar in that $88 million will go directly to ensuring the safer use of nanotechnology-related products.

Nevertheless, I am cautiously optimistic that a larger proportion of the funding will be directly relevant to understanding and minimizing risks in 2010.   Funding increases for NIOSH, NIH, NIST and the US Environmental Protection Agency will all directly contribute to a better understanding of potential risks.  And a large chunk of National Science Foundation funding in this area is already tied up in two research centers specifically focused on environmental impacts.

There is still a long way to go if US government-supported research is to get us to where we need to be with developing safe nanotechnologies.  In addition to funding, there is still a need for increased stakeholder involvement in mapping out research directions and a stronger research strategy.

But it seems that under the new administration things are at least moving in the right direction.

And while an additional $5 million for NIOSH may seem a drop in the ocean in the grand scheme of things, it is a major step forward to protecting one of the more vulnerable groups when it comes to engineered nanomaterials—the people making and using the stuff.

I’m looking at an electron microscope image of a carbon nanotube – as I cannot show it here, you’ll have to imagine it.  It shows a long, straight, multi-walled carbon nanotube, around 100 nanometers wide and 10 micrometers long.  There is nothing particularly unusual about this.  What is unusual is that the image also shows a section of the lining of a mouse’s lung.  And the nanotube is sticking right through the lining, like a needle through a swatch of felt.

The image was shown at the annual Society of Toxicology meeting in Baltimore last week, and comes from a new study by researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) on the impact of inhaled multi-walled carbon nanotubes on mice.

It’s highly significant because it takes scientists a step closer to understanding whether carbon nanotubes that look like harmful asbestos fibers, could cause asbestos-like disease…

Questions were raised about carbon nanotubes and their superficial similarity to asbestos fibers as far back as 1992.  Yet it wasn’t until last year that research was published suggesting carbon nanotubes that look like harmful asbestos fibers could possibly also cause asbestos-like diseases—specifically the disease of the lungs’ lining mesothelioma.

The Poland study, published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, indicated that development of the disease mesothelioma was theoretically possible following inhalation exposure.  But it didn’t establish whether exposure could occur to asbestos-like carbon nanotubes in practice or, if they were inhaled, whether the nanotubes could move to and penetrate the sensitive outer layer of the lungs.

Both steps would have to occur for there to be a chance of mesothelioma developing.

The current study from NIOSH seems to close the loop on one of those steps.  Some caution is needed here as the research has yet to be peer reviewed (see Richard Denison’s comments for instance).  Yet the findings are so significant that NIOSH thought it important to keep people abreast of developments before the work is finally reviewed and published.

In the study, a suspension of carbon nanotubes was introduced into the mice lungs using the pharyngeal aspiration technique, and the movement of the nanotubes through the lungs subsequently tracked.  The researchers found that some of the nanotubes migrated from the alveoli in the lungs (the tiny sacs where oxygen passes form the air to the blood) to the pleura—the delicate membrane surrounding the lungs.  As seen in the image described above, there was direct evidence that some of these needle-like fibers physically penetrated through the lung lining, into the region where mesothelioma can develop.

The researchers are at pains to point out that these data are preliminary, and are not conclusive.  The results could have been influenced by the way the nanotubes were delivered to the lungs, the amount of material applied, or the types of animals used.  Nevertheless, they demonstrate that, in principle, some forms of carbon nanotubes have the potential to migrate to the outer layer of the lungs.  And this, combined with the data from Poland et al., raises the stakes considerably regarding potential health impacts.

The data from this study will be peer-reviewed and published shortly, allowing a more critical evaluation.  But given the significance of the preliminary findings, it seems  there is an urgent need for a more extensive strategic research program to establish how harmful different types of carbon nanotubes are, and how they can be handled safely.

Without this, it’s hard to see how manufacturers will be able to make informed choices on good practices that don’t either endanger workers and users, or place an overwhelming burden on production processes.

In the meantime, the best advice seems to be: Take great care to avoid airborne exposures when working with carbon nanotubes that bear a physical resemblance to asbestos.