ABSTRACT
The chapters demonstrate, science and technology issues are among the most difficult and complex challenges confronting congressional and other policy makers. Policy decisions concerning science and technology are fundamentally choices among competing values, choices about how to act in the face of uncertainty, how to allocate scarce resources, how to insure against risks to human health, how to balance economic growth with other public interests, how to promote individual freedom and collective concerns, and how to satisfy the needs of the current generation along with those of generations to come. Uncertainty has always been a part of congressional policy making. The role information and analysis play in the policy process is a function of “the novelty of the problem for Congress and the degree of entrenchment of interests concerned with any policy solutions. The importance and visibility in society of the emerging concerns, policy makers enjoy a wide range of sources of information concerning the various dimensions of biotechnology.
