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CLOSING Philip Handler I have heard a good deal of philosophy in the last hour. I gather that this Forum has been a success in that it has allowed the ventilation of views and a certain amount of discourse between people who ordinarily don't speak to each other on matters of their common interest. This is among our principal purposes. Those who easily use words like safety have discovered, I hope, how difficult it is to establish what the word means in any given context and, having stated what is meant, how diffi- cult it is to establish whether something really is or is not safe. In the discussion I have been privileged to hear this afternoon, Mr. Wessel shot closest to home for me. Like Dr. Veech, you see, we never know what problem will come through these doors. When one is placed before us, we do our best to learn how to address the specific problem, to gather the expertise necessary to look at it, to assure ourselves that there is no built-in bias or prejudice among those whom we ask to address a given question. If bias or prejudice should be present, we then proceed to balance the committee so that all possible biases are evident. In truth, it is very difficult for any somewhat informed individual to come into any question without a bias. In the end, we find ourselves in difficulty. There never is enough information. All reports from this institution inevitably ask for more research. I find nothing wrong in that. There is the problem, however, that under those circumstances the government will always be faced with the task of making decisions in the face of uncertainty. Our task is to reduce the extent of the uncertainty and to make clear just what that degree of uncertainty really is. It is then up to the government to undertake its actions. We rarely, if ever, tell the government what to do; rather, we do state what the circumstances are in which the govern- ment must act. Inevitably, there are conflicting views from different 23l
232 quarters that all too frequently take on a strongly partisan character. It is much easier to cry alarm than it is to prove safety. Some of what you have heard in the last two days is the result of a kind of growing "chemophobia," a distrust of the introduction of chemi- cals into our society. There is good cause for such distrust, and it behooves us -- as individuals, as members of the scientific community, and as the government --to assure ourselves each time a new chemical entity is introduced in our society that its properties are both desir- able and acceptable. Unfortunately, proving either of those is extraor- dinarily difficult, and we have learned this repeatedly. What is most difficult of all -- and that is my interpretation of what Mr. Wessel was saying -- is accustoming the nonscientific public to speaking in quantitative terms. Safety and risk always require def- inition, and no law known to me has ever specified what those words really mean. Risk is a statistical concept. It is the statistical likelihood of an undesirable outcome, given some specific, finite num- ber of events. Safety is the level of risk that society has decided to accept; if it ever asks for zero risk, then it is being foolish indeed, because there are no such circumstances as zero risk. Everything in our environment poses a hazard of some degree. Some we have decided to live with, some we wish we did not have to live with but we don't know what to do about, and some we can manage to bring under control. Our task in the Academy and occasionally in these fo- rums is to determine which situation is in which category. If it is one on which our society has decided to act, then it is our further task to establish what the degree of uncertainty is, how to reduce the degree of uncertainty, and how to make the government as comfortable as possi- ble with an unavoidable decision. To the extent that these issues have been illuminated here in these last two days, our purposes have been achieved. To all of you, I thank you for coming and hope that you will be here with us again for the next Forum.
