Science, risk and the price of precaution

[maury <maury@webtexas.com>]

Some of you may enjoy the following article indicated in  its brief

introduction  below. The entire article appears at:

              http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006DD7A.htm



Cheers (enjoy at your own risk)

Maury Siskel          maury@webtexas.com

=======================================

1 May 2003

Science, risk and the price of precaution

         by Sandy Star



Imagine medicine without vaccines, penicillin, antibiotics, aspirin,

X-rays, heart surgery, or the contraceptive pill.



Imagine scientific theory without Newton, Galileo, quantum

mechanics, or the human genome project.



Imagine transport without aeroplanes, railways, cars or bicycles; power

without gas, electricity or nuclear energy; agriculture without

pesticides, hybrid crops or the plough. Imagine man had never been to

the moon.



This is how scientists imagine history, had past developments been

subject to the constraints of the 'precautionary principle' - the

assumption that experimentation should only proceed where there is a

guarantee that the outcome will not be harmful.



In the run-up to spiked's conference Panic Attack: Interrogating our

obsession with risk, taking place at London's Royal Institution on

Friday 9 May, we asked 40 members of the international scientific

community to list what significant discoveries and achievements would

have been limited or prevented, if science at the time had been governed

by the precautionary principle that dominates science today.



Between them, respondents came up with an A-Z of historic

achievements that would have been thwarted by the precautionary

principle:

                     ------- snipped----------------

-----------------------------

It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves under the flag, and

whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the

flag.             Charles M. Province





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