how awful our
lives would be if the "precautionary principle" had been allowed to
prevail in the past. Their response was:
no heart surgery or antibiotics, and hardly
any drugs at all; no aeroplanes, bicycles or high-voltage power
grids; no
pasteurisation, pesticides or bio-technology; no quantum mechanics; no wheel; no
"discovery" of
America. In short, their message was: no risk, no gain.
They have absolutely missed the point. The precautionary principle is a subtle idea.
It has various
forms, but all of them generally include some notion of costeffectiveness.
Thus the point is not simply to ban
things that are not known to be
absolutely safe. Rather, it says: "Of course you can make no progress
without risk.
But if there is no obvious gain from taking the risk, then don't take it."
Clearly, all the technologies
listed by the 40 well-chosen savants were innately risky
at their inception, as all technologies are. But all of
them would have received the
green light under the precautionary principle because they all had the
potential to
offer tremendous benefits — the solutions to very big problems if only the snags
could be
overcome.
If the precautionary principle had been in place, the scientists tell us, we would not
have antibiotics.
But of course we would — if the version of the principle that
sensible people now understand had been
applied. When penicillin was discovered
in the 1920s, infective bacteria were laying waste to the world.
Children died from
diphtheria and whooping cough, every open drain brought the threat of typhoid, and
