From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: Highlights of a GAO Forum on Nanomanufacturing &
Implications for U.S. Competiveness

Description: Audio interview by GAO staff with Tim Persons, Chief
Scientist, Applied Research and Methodology

Related GAO Work: GAO-14-181SP: Nanomanufacturing: Emergence and
Implications for U.S. Competitiveness, the Environment, and Human Health
 
Released: February 2014


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[ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and
information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's
February, 2014. GAO periodically conducts forums that stimulate new
partnerships and identify actions to address issues related to the
federal government's role in meeting 21st century challenges. GAO
convened one such forum in July, 2013 to discuss the future of
nanomanufacturing and its potential effects on U.S. competitiveness in
world markets. A team led by GAO's Chief Scientist, Tim Persons,
recently published the highlights of that forum. GAO's Sarah Kaczmarek
sat down with Tim to talk about what they learned.

[ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] What's nanomanufacturing? And how does it impact
consumers?

[ Tim Persons: ] So nanomanufacturing is really the shift of, or the
movement of nanotechnology into the manufacturing sector. So it deals
with really two meanings of the word scale. Nano means one billionth of
a meter. In this case you think of it as one one-thousandth of a human
hair. We're talking about that on the order of size. But that
manipulation and control and design of materials at that low level has
implications all the way up into the very big, and of course
manufacturing often involves building many things, often large things.
So you can think about how the very small could have a very large impact
on something like an airplane wing, or something like the miles of
concrete that are laid down in a highway. That's really what
nanomanufacturing is.

[ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] And what do you see as the future of this new
technology?

[ Tim Persons: ] So the future of nanomanufacturing—this is what's best
described as a megatrend. It's something that has broad implication on
many, many parts of society and the environment, the economy. And it
does have social implications, even. And so the future of this is coming
to think about how goods and services are produced, or how things can
even become cheaper, lighter, better, faster, by design, even from down
at the one-one thousandths of a hair level. The future of this just has
profound implications on so many things that we cover in our report.

[ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] So what do you see as the major challenges here for
U.S. competitiveness?

[ Tim Persons: ] The immediate challenge to U.S. competitiveness is just
the idea of having standards for these things. Even materials that are
well known, let's say aluminum, as an example, we drink out of it in
soda cans and so on, we know that. But at the nano scale it can behave
even differently than what we know about it when we're drinking soda
cans. So there's a lot of issues that remain about the standards of
nano-size particles--their shape, their size, their form, what they do,
how they interact. And there's the concern of course of going down that
far down the scale, the challenges can be in the environment health and
safety domain on--are they good for worker safety? Or are they good for
consumer safety and so on. And there's a good deal of work going on, and
I think will continue to go on globally on those things. So, standards.
Understanding the environment health safety are some challenges. And
then just the broader implications of intellectual property management,
or the issues behind an innovation economy, and a number of things still
remain. This is just one part of a global discussion about how can we be
more innovative? How can we do more science tech engineering and math or
STEM-type things. And so that's what you will see here is continuing
challenges in that domain.

[ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] Let me ask you then, what do you see as next steps
in this area?

[ Tim Persons: ] I think the first thing is thinking holistically
about—meaning not only the U.S.—but thinking holistically and even in
partnership with our even trade partners like the European Union and so
on and its member states, and like our friends in Japan and so on. I
think that next steps would be working through some of these fundamental
issues about the standards of these things, about the environment health
safety risk management on those are some next steps. Thinking about the
broad implications here at home, what nanomanufacturing means in our
manufacturing sector as we see its resurgence been coming on in recent
months and maybe the last one or two years. I think that we have to
think about what does nanotechnology do for us? How can it help us to be
more competitive? Again, to make things cheaper, better, quicker, and so
on.

[ Sarah Kaczmarek: ] Given the broad range of nanomanufacturing, what's
the bottom line for U.S. consumers?

[ Tim Persons: ] The bottom line is avoid fear, to the first order. The
manipulation of things is very small. There's been some discussions to
the popular press about potential risks. And I think avoiding fear, and
instead focusing on risk-management-based thinking on the technology,
what its implications are and so on. And knowing that there are good
faith efforts going on to characterize materials, to manage them, and to
again both protect workers and consumers as goods and services are
produced. I think that's the bottom line. And I think that consumers are
already feeling positive effects, for example, from nanomanufacturing,
and we have it in our smartphones. Most of us carry around something
like that. That's a device that really has nanotechnology at its core.
It's done by silicon manufacturers and chip makers and foundries and so
on. And so we have that. That's been proven safe. It can be, and I
believe given the proper risk management it will be safe.

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