Last Friday I posted 24 questions on nanotechnology safety provided by folks on Twitter and FaceBook, in a naive attempt to see if people could find matching answers on the web.  Predictably perhaps, there weren’t too many responses.  This wasn’t too surprising – I’m beginning to realize that asking for feedback on the web is about as effective as inviting complete strangers at the grocery store to come round and clean your bathroom; not that attractive a proposition.  On top of this though, the questions were tough, and web-based answers scarce.

In posting the questions, I wanted to see how easy it was to get useful information on nanotechnology safety from the web, and whether there were any resources that rose to the top of the pile as being particularly useful.  Unfortunately, I have to conclude that there are remarkably few web sites out there that clearly and directly answer the types of questions people are interested in.  It’s not only the low response rate that led me to this conclusion – I tried finding useful sites myself, and gave up after the 6th question!

It seems that, ten years after the US government launched the multi-billion dollar National Nanotechnology Initiative that put nanotechnology on the map, it’s still nearly impossible to get  straight (and fast) answers to the sorts of questions people are asking…

Of course, there are some decent resources out there if you want a general introduction to nanotechnology.  Nano & me remains one of my favorite*.  And if you are specifically interested in nanotechnology safety, there are a number of Frequently Asked Questions lists – check out the NIOSH FAQ for instance, or the SafeNano FAQ.  But there’s a curious disconnect between these lists of questions, and the ones submitted to 2020 Science.  It almost seems as if these sites are answering the questions they think people are asking, rather than the ones they are.

Whichever way you look at it, despite all the information on nanotechnology safety that you can find floating around on the web, it seems that people are still struggling to find answers to the questions that matter to them.  Rather than FAQs, they are faced with QSAs – Questions you Should Ask.

Maybe it’s time for a true nanotechnology safety FAQ (or wiki or whatever – I suspect FAQ’s are so last decade) that provides answers to the questions people are really asking, rather than the ones “experts” think they should be asking.

Wouldn’t that be a novel idea!

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Having thrown the gauntlet down here, I feel I should do something about those 24 questions that are still hanging out there without many good answers.  So I’ll see what I can do about posting some short A’s to the Q’s from my perspective – stay tuned. [Update: link to my answers here]

*To those in the know, The US National Nanotechnology Initiative website – http://www.nano.gov – is deep well of nanotech information.  Sadly, you also need to bring along a long rope, flashlight and other spelunking gear to get anything useful out of it.  The good news is that a major update is planned for the website – maybe the new and improved nano.gov will even have some real Q&A for real people – you never know!