Going Beyond Green - Research Progress on Environmental Health and Safety Aspects of Engineered Nanomaterials - page 77

essential part of its mission. Without such a lead organization to sustain support for the EHS agenda in the
competition for government resources, the EHS nanotechnology research enterprise will falter, and we
will not be able to achieve the ideal of responsible nanotechnology development.
Funding is only part of the challenge, however; it is vital that the best researchers in this country
and beyond remain interested in and willing to tackle this problem. Various cultures in government,
academe, and industry both support and sustain individual scientists and investigative teams. “Cultural
and institutional obstacles often discourage attempts to perform research across disciplines, agencies, and
institutions (including public and private organizations). Such obstacles can reflect historical tendencies
to conduct research within particular disciplinary or organizational boundaries—for example, toxicology
vs epidemiology and government vs industry” (NRC 2001, p. 141). Moreover, a scientist's career
advancement requires attention to institutional, rather than national, agendas. A role as coauthor of a
multidisciplinary manuscript may do little to advance an academic career if recognition is attached only to
first or senior authorship. Similarly, scientific journals typically focus on particular fields and are
reluctant to publish outside of their own scopes. Meetings of professional societies often run parallel
sessions with researchers partitioned into focused sessions on physical science or biologic science, and
this limits opportunities for cross-fertilization. All those factors taken together make it difficult to
assemble the best teams to tackle the research outlined in Chapter 4.
In recognizing such disincentives as they apply to multidisciplinary research on EHS aspects of
ENMs, the committee recommends that incentives be established to foster joint planning and information
exchange. Examples of such incentives are enhanced support to give higher priority to multidisciplinary,
integrated EHS aspects of ENMs; frequent multisponsor, multidisciplinary meetings to build a
community of investigators addressing EHS aspects of ENMs; and a cross-agency budget for key
multidisciplinary research initiatives. Such efforts might go a long way toward eliminating or at least
decreasing the barriers that limit the broad perspective required in tackling the complex subject of EHS
aspects of ENMs.
ADAPTIVE DECISION-MAKING AND KNOWLEDGE-SHARING
All stakeholders in nanotechnology EHS research, whether they are citizens or academic
researchers, should have access to the growing body of knowledge surrounding nanotechnology-related
EHS concerns. Such a resource would help to improve public understanding, inform policy-makers, offer
data for future researchers, and shape the future focus of the research. As envisioned in Chapter 4, the
diverse audiences would be served by the same resource—termed a knowledge commons—because it
would provide information relevant to nanotechnology EHS research at multiple levels of detail. The
resource would also provide an archival function: all data collected during the course of nanotechnology
EHS research would be available to future generations of researchers.
For researchers, the most important aspect of the knowledge commons is access to existing data.
The knowledge commons would provide storage for raw data or links to data derived from the processed
data and would offer some curation, annotation, and linkages of datasets. Those features would make it
possible to establish the provenance, reproducibility, and uncertainty of future data and in effect “bank”
them for consideration by future researchers. The knowledge commons would provide a means of
augmenting the current print literature digitally to access and compare raw data; evaluate their quality,
uncertainty, and reproducibility; and augment collaboration to evaluate risk associated with both
applications and implications of nanotechnology (Priem 2013). As presented in Chapter 4, research on
nanotechnology-related risk is a highly multidisciplinary, systems-level scientific challenge; shared
databases and knowledge commons are vital for rapid progress in that they permit the integration of
information among material types, species, and exposure routes.
For interested stakeholders (such as regulators, scientists, workers, and consumers) who are not
actively engaged in the research, the knowledge commons could serve as an excellent resource for meta-
analysis of multiple publications, continuing research projects, and datasets. Summaries of research