Nanotechnology and Patents - How can Potential Risks be Assessed?

Increasingly, food and agricultural industries are gearing up to use nanotechnological innovations to expand their already multi trillion dollar industries globally. The scientific community has identified a number of serious issues relating to risk assessments of nanomaterials such as the difficulty of characterising, detecting and measuring nanomaterials, as well as a lack of sufficient toxicology data. Apart from the scientific issues surrounding risk assessment, public acceptance of nanotechnology itself and nanofoods in particular continues to be elusive. This paper addresses the need to expand concepts of risk to include intangible or moral risk in the assessment of nanotechnologies. ‘Intervention’ points along the innovation chain are explored, where an expanded risk assessment could be applied, with a particular focus on the patent system.