How to Let Ordinary People in on the Future:

Be careful, take precautions

Jacques Testart / Le Monde Diplomatique Sep00

Translated by Derry Cook-Radmore

Expert opinion on the new biotechnologies doesn't have the qualities we associate with a scientific approach, because, whatever the level of research, nobody can predict the future with certainty. We should ask 'unexpert' people to judge whether we even need the proposed changes.

The expression "precautionary principle" - sometimes overworked - is central to the fierce scientific, technological and ethical debates going on today. In France, the principle itself was written into the lawbooks with the 1995 loi Barnier, which lays down that "The absence of certainty must not hold back the adoption of effective and proportionate measures to prevent serious and irreversible harm". Recently however, custom and the rules have enshrined a narrow view of things: scientific experts weigh up the potential risks of a new technology to human health and the environment, and the results of their assessment then form the basis on which a political decision is taken. Nothing, or very little, separates science and legislation. Ordinary people, on whose behalf the innovation in question is supposedly being introduced, are to a great extent cut out of the process: they are the missing link in the chain.

It can be argued that this is no different from how other decisions are taken, since the politicians in charge, representing the voters, are held to be acting in the public interest. Yet gauging the effects a "risk" technology might have has very little in common with building a bridge, or equipping a hospital, or exporting fruit and vegetables. In classic situations like these, uncertainty, though there usually is some, is so slight that the judgment of experts - engineers, doctors, economists and so on - can be relied on enough for rational decisions to be taken.

When, on the other hand, technologies likely to affect the environment and domestic species, or indeed human beings, are concerned, "expert assessment is no longer based solely on the validity of knowledge, and the scientific guarantee it confers on the decision, but on its ability to take the uncertainties into account and chart a scenario for an uncertain future" (1). As the recent Kourilsky-Viney report to the French prime minister pointed out, "The expert does not know" and, to make matters worse, his opinions "are not free of all prejudice" (2). This statement is amply illustrated in the report, in particular when countering the argument that genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) could reduce biodiversity. It detects in this standpoint "a certain ideological charge" and points out that "the emergence of Aids is one manifestation of biodiversity".

Situations calling for the precautionary principle typically involve an irreducible minimum of uncertainty. No-one, certainly not a rational mind, can foresee the future, and even the present throws up previously unheard-of effects. The European Commission consequently says that it will "be guided by the precautionary principle when analysing risk in cases where the scientific bases are insufficient or where there are uncertainties" (3). Uncertainty among experts is more and more common, whether it is in knowing if there is any danger in eating British beef (4) or in answering the concerns raised by transgenic plants (5). So expert opinion, even from the best of specialists, does not have the qualities one usually attaches to the scientific approach, and it would be better to talk about "opinion from scientists" rather than "scientific opinion".

Even if the experts are beyond reproach, and unaffected by the ideology of techno-science and pressures from the business world, all their contribution can do is chart the limits of ignorance. There are two main reasons for this. First of all, there is not enough of the knowledge needed to analyse problems that are becoming more and more acute. What risks are there, for instance, in accepting a blood donation from someone who has been living in Britain, the home ground of the mad cow? And then there is the impossibility of bringing together disparate items of information from a variety of expert assessments, and giving them the precise weighting that will allow them, taken together, to provide an objective picture of a complex subject: for example, examining the causes of climate change and forecasting how it is going to develop.

All-powerful scientific discourse

Since experts themselves recognise that there is uncertainty (or at least a constant and irreducible residue of it), it seems inconsistent to grant scientific opinion the status of unchallengeable knowledge, and see it as enough to base a political decision on. Yet this is what the European Commission is proposing in a recent communication (6) that ignores the whole debate going on in society. This shift towards simplified reasoning, forgetting how complex the phenomena being analysed really are, starts as soon as the scientist and engineer (and even the economist) are seen as the only experts, brushing aside all the other kinds of knowledge that also help us reach understanding.

These include areas of professional knowledge, such as sociology and ecology; but they also take in forms of knowledge shared by the whole of humankind - intuition, common-sense, aesthetic sense, feelings, know-how, a sense of how the world works. Unless one accepts that a politician, too. would be competent in areas like feelings, emotion, human wellbeing, relationship to nature, pleasure and suffering - none of them the qualities that got him chosen or elected -, a vast field of judgment is being deliberately cut out between the technical evaluation and the decision to make widespread use of a technology.

The exclusion of the "humanities" from what goes on between the technico-scientific machinery and the decision-taking machinery reflects how predominant scientific discourse has become, to the point of usurping science itself. So it is surprising to read, in the Kourilsky-Viney report, a page headed with the statement "GMOs present no special risk to the consumer, though the latter must be free to choose". Gone are the doubts expressed elsewhere in the same text! GMOs are henceforth guaranteed risk-free. And to make it clear that any resistance would show an irrational attitude, freedom of choice - perhaps made possible by labelling - is put on the same level as the choice, say, to eat only kosher food.

Scientists insist on the need to quantify the technological risks to ensure they are credible and not taken as just wild imaginings. The Commission in Brussels, too, has called for a structured decision-taking process based on detailed scientific data and other objective information. So many references to science and objectivity leave you to understand that somewhere there is someone who knows the answers, and also that if something cannot be "quantified", then it cannot count as a valid argument. Yet the Commission also tells decision-makers that "they need to be aware of the degree of uncertainty attached to the results of the evaluation of the available scientific information". This is rather like describing an idyllic situation (science must know, on principle), while mentioning current shortcomings (the degree of uncertainty) that are held to be temporary, and refusing to entertain other arguments that are not amenable to science even if they are no more uncertain than the scientific assessment.

Enshrining the legal precautionary principle has displaced the moral principle that has often been evoked over the past two decades as - to use Hans Jonas's expression (7) - the responsibility principle. For Jonas, already concerned about nuclear and genetic engineering, one ethical response to the problem was quite simply to scrap a project; today's precaution leads rather to postponing it, or adapting the conditions in which it is used.

Supposing that a technological innovation is in fact devoid of any potential risk, on the precautionary principle, this is not enough on its own to say one is being fully responsible in using it. Especially not in respect of sustainable development, which demands that thought be given to other concerns - the effects on development, nature, social equity, employment, regional solidarity and the North-South relationship, and so on. However could we have tied ourselves down for so long with a moral principle like this, which can be endlessly brandished, when globalisation is demanding that we pay greater deference to the new values of competitiveness, free trade, investment, productivity and technological progress?

Among the ironclad ideas that allow no intelligent objection, there is the banal, mantra-like phrase "There is no such thing as zero risk" - recited to guard against the possible consequences of the lack of precaution we are preparing to accept. But do we have to break eggs if no-one actually needs the omelette? The experts' debate, circumscribed by its concern with demonstrating the risk - or rather, that there is none - is concealing the public's lack of demand for, or even interest in, what is being argued about. This is true of the transgenic plants the big industrial companies are trying to foist on the public. And they are doing it with the active support of most of the experts and the complicity of a number of our political masters. The politicians seem unaware of betraying those who put them there, no doubt because they believe they are acting for the common good against wrong-headed resistance. They are acting out of belief, rather than reason.

Is it not, in fact, the ideology of assured and irreversible progress that leads serious-minded people to act as if there were some kind of proof of the advantages they are claiming for GM crops? Do we have to be content with the vague (and minor) gains in productivity announced by the industrial companies - working from non-exhaustive appraisals - to come to the conclusion that GM plants are all right? Even if incontrovertible results were soon to show clear agricultural advantages from using GMOs (and not just promises of advantages), the absence of such facts in today's expert assessments is proof that lack of scientific rigour is not necessarily the preserve of "those opposed to progress" - a verdict borne out by the politicians' blind acceptance of these truncated expert evaluations. It is as if a shared devotion to the ascendancy of technology ruled out any challenging of the advantages, and just conceded an attempt to check on its harmlessness.

A specious form of argument seeks to justify focusing expert assessment solely on the technical and measurable aspects of the risk, leaving aside the social and cultural effects of the techniques such as, in the case of GM plants, the quality of life, the industrialisation of rural activities, the concentration on productivity, and so on. Questions like this are often dismissed by arguing that they already existed before GM technology appeared on the scene, as neither the selection of varieties nor the laws of the marketplace are specific to GM. This is ignoring the possibility that the combined effect of speeding-up and standardising practices will be a qualitative social and cultural change. The sudden shifts that transgenic modification introduces could have results very different from those we know from the slow, gradual mechanisms of natural development and traditional plant selection.

When what man does triggers irreversible effects, we are going beyond discovery and mastery, and getting ourselves embroiled in what could well bring devastation. This is reason to submit the new technique to thorough examination, so as to take account of everything that is not, in its essence, what has been done traditionally. If not, we should also have to accept the Terminator system (8), on the grounds that all it does is to improve the commercial efficiency of the breeders who have been at work for more than a century. With impeccable liberal logic, the Kourilsky-Viney report does comment that no-one is obliged to buy Terminator-type seed!

To play down the impact of GMOs on man and his environment, we are being told that genetic modification goes on in nature. Bacteria in the soil have always swapped genes that provide resistance to antibiotics; modern wheat has received genome fragments from rye; mitochondria and chloroplasts are vestiges of bacteria ingested by animal or plant cells; plants and animals have for a long time incorporated viral genetic sequences; and so on.

All that is certainly true. But it is no real argument for an immediate, massive and irreversible disseminating of transgenic plants. And it is in order to escape public mistrust that the companies are turning to the "second generation" of GMOs: this is supposed to be using the advantage provided by induced mutation, or by transferring a useful gene belonging to the species being improved rather than an alien gene, so as to get closer to the traditional pattern of varietal selection. But because of the speed at which a living organism is being forced to evolve by these innovations, and of the presence of a high-powered technical and commercial set-up, these second-generation GMOs will still have the characteristics of a new phenomenon; and they will still, directly and irreversibly, affect the relationship of humans to domesticated nature and to other humans.

How are we to arrive at sensible political decisions if deadlocks in meaning are to be added to science's uncertainties and experts' subjectivity? In his analysis of "technical democracy" (9), Michel Callon reminds us of the part scientists played in educating the public in a "struggle for the Enlightenment and against obscurantism". This function is often interpreted in a messianic light by scientific circles, who believe themselves warranted by things like the public opinion survey on GM plants quoted in a recent report by INRA (10), the French national agronomic research institute.

Asked the question, "Ordinary tomatoes do not contain genes, while genetically-modified ones do. True or false?", only 32% of people in France gave the right answer (as against 46% in the United States and 52% in Canada). So it is deduced that there is no point asking questions to such an ignorant public. The public obviously does need educating; but there is nothing to indicate that doing so will inevitably lead to GM plants being accepted - unless ethical stance is confused with scientific reasoning and knowledge. This is also why Michel Callon stresses the importance of enlisting the knowledge of lay people to give decisions full legitimacy.

It is interesting to look back at the citizens' conference on GMOs organised by the French parliamentary office for the evaluation of scientific and technological options (Opecst) in June 1998. According to the sociologists who wrote the report referred to earlier, this forum made it possible to demonstrate a "specific competence" on the part of lay people who, thanks to "a vision free of local vested interests ... have the cognitive capacity needed for taking part in the technological evaluation". The same report underlines the shortcomings of parliamentarians in shouldering their responsibilities where new technologies are concerned: only "a few deputies who become experts among the experts" immerse themselves in the "ocean of tedium" that background documents on nuclear or GMO matters involve; and parliament, which "reproduces within itself the divides our society creates between experts and non-experts", tends to see the legitimacy of citizens' conferences "as a threat".

It may have been this attitude that led French member of parliament Jean-Yves Le Déaut to backtrack from the enthusiasm he had shown when organising the citizens' conference. A year later, he was decrying as "pure demagoguery" any desire for "direct democracy, a sort of latterday substitute for the agora of classical times". He did not want to see the citizens' conference as anything more than "one more point of view, that of non-specialists, to be put alongside that of the experts, and of the associations and parties involved in the subject"(11). As if to say that educated public opinion is merely one result among others, and not what gives meaning to the results of expert assessment! As French writer Denis Duclos has put it, "the important level of political discussion is where we are discussing the play we are going to perform, and not just the details of this or that piece of business, or the casting, or how much the actors are going to be paid" (12).

To achieve this "important level of political discussion", putting precaution into practice in environmental matters (and of course in other fields as well) demands the active involvement of ordinary people. It is surprising, therefore, to find no mention of public debate in the European Commission's communication on the precautionary principle; this makes one fear that the proposals - lukewarm as they are - in the Kourilsky-Viney report are being seen as the height of boldness in making precaution a democratic concern.

Yet an ambition like this is looking for something quite different from the concession that suits the experts, that of giving one or two innocent souls a seat on a technical committee where they are taken hostage and crushed beneath the weight of science and the scientists' authority. And it means something different from the "second circle" favoured by the same report, where "selected" members of the public accompanied by scientific experts - the "first circle" - would be allowed to offer an opinion.

In 1992 Jean-Jacques Salomon, last president of the French College for the Prevention of Technological Risk, wrote that "Faced with the powers at the disposal of the technicians' lobbies in modern societies, the only way of limiting the damage is to strengthen the procedures for information, consultation and negotiation that ensure the democratic functioning of our institutions" (13).

A truly democratic system could take a form similar to the one we proposed - without success - for the national committee on ethics (14). There again, it would be a matter of reducing every expert to a purely informative role, and then having faith in the intelligence, intuition and good sense of responsible citizens. This is the line taken by the French Committee on Sustainable Development, which has just put forward an opinion (15) that calls for a consultative committee for the evaluation of technologies (CCET) made up of volunteers selected by lot and with a reputation for "openness of mind" - independent, that is, of industry, the research field and non-governmental organisations. After completing a study, they would be asked to draft an opinion giving the view of ordinary people.

This committee would have the authority to consult all parties without distinction - drawing on the expertise of scientists and people in the social sciences, industrialists, economists, professional associations, etc. - in order to arrive at its opinion. This would be not only the most democratic way of conducting an expert assessment, but also the most "scientific" - assuming scientific to mean the product of reason that does not lose sight of the fact that it does not know everything.

It would not, of course, be a question of abandoning these unfortunate "open minds", who have volunteered to learn about the subject and bear responsibility, to the torments of technique and methodology. They would have to be given a "moderator" skilled in human relations, together with a steering committee (itself independent of what is at stake in the evaluation) that would suggest and bring together the various sources of expertise. If consensus could not be found within the CCET, there could be citizens' conferences; held simultaneously and widespread geographically, such a decentralised arrangement would make it easier to achieve objectivity.

Where opinions converged, this would be seen as representing enlightened public opinion. Persistent differences of opinion would indicate insuperable difficulties. A set-up like this could readily be transposed to regional level, where the views of a European consultative committee could be backed up by those of national citizens' conferences. The cost of managing structures like this should be met by a specially-created fund, financed by contributions from those promoting the technological innovations.

In all cases, the political world would then at last have something to justify its decisions. It would still need to take account of other factors, in particular geopolitical ones (as is after all the case with decisions of any kind), but do so without ignoring the effects its action would have over time in the world around; that is to say, it would have to resist a number of temptations that have already been identified (16).

The first is that of casuistry - an age-old practice but one happily revived by some who would sooner argue endlessly than follow the law, and who dodge the principles of good conduct by taking refuge in individual foibles. The second temptation is the moratorium, which makes it possible to pave the way to acceptance through familiarity, relying on ethics becoming watered down with the passage of time. And finally there is the temptation to shut one's front door on the outside world - to act as if there were several humankinds, and not all of them inhabited the same planet, so that deciding what to do here does not mean you have to be bothered by knowing what is then going to happen somewhere else. If we are to be really serious, with a truly sustainable development in mind, we shall have to accept that acting cautiously is the business of everyone in the world.

* Jacques Testart is director of research at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), and chairman of the French Committee on Sustainable Development. His publications include Le desir du gene, Flammarion, 1994; Des hommes probables. De la procreation aleatoire a la reproduction normative, Le Seuil, Paris, 1999; and Des grenouilles et des hommes, Le Seuil, 2000.

1. Bernard Kalaora, "Global expert: la religion des mots", Ethnologie française, XXIX, 1999, p. 4.

2. Philippe Kourilsky and Geneviève Viney, Report to the prime minister on the principle of precaution, Paris, October 1999.

3. European Commission, Communication on consumer health and food safety, 30 April 1997, COM (97)183 final, Official Journal of the European Communities (OJEC), C 97/202 of 30 April 1997.

4. See "Etiquetage et traçabilité ne sont pas une panacée", Libération, 26 November 1999.

5. See "La biotechnologie sème à tout vent", Le Monde diplomatique, May 1997.

6. European Commission, Communication on the precautionary principle, 2 February 2000, COM (00)153 final, OJEC, C 2000/58 of 2 February 2000.

7. Hans Jonas, Le Principle responsabilité: une éthique pour la civilisation technologique , Editions du Cerf, Paris, 1990.

8. This is a genetic procedure that inhibits fertility in plants from transgenic cereals, and thus means that seed has to be bought afresh each year. The indignation this "innovation" aroused made Monsanto give up marketing it (for the time being?). See Jean-Pierre Berlan and Richard C. Lewontin, "Operation Terminator", Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, December 1998;

9. Michel Callon, "Des différentes formes de démocratie technique", Annales des Mines, no. 9, Paris, 1998.

10. Pierre Benoît Joly, Gérard Assouline, Dominique Kréziak, Juliette Lemarié, Claire Marris and Alexis Roy, L'Innovation controversée: le débat public sur les OGM en France, INRA, Grenoble, January 2000.

11. Jean-Yves Le Déaut, Choix technologiques, débat public et décision politique. L'opinion publique face aux plantes transgéniques, Albin Michel, Paris, 1999.

12. Denis Duclos, "Universelle exigence de pluralité", Le Monde diplomatique, January 2000.

13. Jean-Jacques Salomon, Le Destin technologique, Balland, Paris, 1992.

14. See "Procréation médicalement assistée: l'éthique et la loi", Etudes, Paris, no. 3816, December 1994, and "De l'expertise à la compétence", Transversales Science Culture, no. 32, March-April 1995.

15. French Committee on Sustainable Development, "View on the report to the prime minister by François Kourilsky and Geneviève Viney: the principle of precaution", March 2000.

16. Des hommes probables. De la procréation aléatoire à la reproduction normative, Le Seuil, Paris, 1999. See Patrick Viveret, "Un humanisme à refonder", Le Monde diplomatique, February 2000.