ABSTRACT
I n 1999 Gail Charnley, then president of the Society for Risk Analysis, declared in the Society's newsletter that ‘the precautionary principle is threatening to take the place of risk analysis as the basis for regulatory decision making in a number of places, particularly in Europe’ (Charnley, 1999). Returning to the subject in the same forum in early 2000, she described risk analysis as ‘a discipline under fire’, threatened by a
serious, growing, antirisk-analysis sentiment that is challenging the legitimacy of science in general and risk analysis in particular... And what is it being replaced with? The so-called precautionary principle or the “better-safe-than-sorry” approach.
