So Are You Nano?
Too-small products might alarm (or at least cripple) German consumers
The public was against pasteurization when it started to become widespread. There were huge labels cautioning you that the milk was "heated," and people were wary of giving up raw milk for the specious benefits of boiling milk to kill harmful organisms. Who's to say it doesn't have harmful effects of its own?
Indeed. Over 100 years later, there's suspicion that a bacteria called MAP remains in milk and might cause Crohn's disease. It's controversial and far from proven, but some researchers are obsessed with it. Again, is this the remnant of some atavistic anti-pasteurization urge, or people who want to put the habit of drinking cow's milk (which is somewhat odd, if you really think about it) completely behind us? Or could there actually be something to it? We don't know. It's the sort of objection that's split American and Europe into pasteurization camps, HTST and UHT, and that further plagues the newer procedure of food irradiation. And it's the problem that could definitely be foreseen with nanotechnology.
Who hasn't woken from the nightmare of shining waves of nanobots, glittering on the wind and soaring over the city, decimating anything they can snag onto with their impossibly tiny servos? Okay, that might just be me, but the fear should be implicit in anyone who's been introduced to the self-replicating, "grey goo" potential of nanotech.
Of course, what's really nano at this point? First off, I'm tera-skeptical that a home detergent which retails at less than, say €200 a bottle, has nanoparticles in it. So, even and especially if it's just a technical glitch, recalls like this could be exceedingly bad press for nano, which might not even be involved with some junior marketer exploiting my polymer ignorance. There's a lot of worries to be addressed, and unless some legislation is fast-tracked into use until the public catches up with the technology, we could have some pasteurization-sized misgivings. From this article on the new phenomenon of nano products:
Curious if a couple hundred nanotoxicology experts were as surprised about this product as I was, I asked the audience who among them would feel comfortable using this product. By a show of hands, fewer than 10 indicated that they would. I decided to follow up further with a few fullerene scientists and nanotoxicology experts. Everyone I spoke with basically said the same thing: There's just not enough information out there to make a good decision either way.