Regulatory Law
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Description
The law’s response to the environmental, health, and safety risks of genetically engineered products and processes reflects society’s ambitions and aspirations, but also it fears and doubts. Genetic engineering based on selective breeding is an ancient practice. Techniques of genetic engineering at the cellular level were developed during the past century. Recombinant DNA and other new techniques developed during the past two decades have greatly enhanced the poser and precision of genetic engineering by enabling genetic selection and transfer to be performed at the molecular level. The old and new techniques, collected under the label biotechnology, offer great health, environmental, and economic benefits. But they also potentially present three categories of adverse effects. The most direct, first-order risks are potential adverse impacts of bioengineered organisms of humans, plants, animals, and ecological systems through pathogenic injury or environmental disruption and displacement. For example, a bioengineered organism introduced in order to assist the growth of a crop on a given plot might migrate and harm natural ecosystems or other crops on adjacent land. Broader, second-order risks consist of adverse economic, social, and political transformations that may result from the application of powerful new agricultural or human genetic applications. For example, bioengineered crops might alter economies of scale, favoring large farms over small farms or vice versa. These transformations may in turn lead to indirect, third-order environmental effects. The development of bioengineered herbicide-resistant crops might encourage greater use of chemical herbicides, for example, causing ecological damage, or biotechnology might encourage excessive reliance on a few crop strains, reducing genetic diversity and increasing the vulnerability of agriculture to blights. The most nebulous but potentially most profound third-order effects are changes in our conceptions of ourselves and of nature resulting from the wide-scale exercise of new and powerful techniques to alter the characteristics of humans and other organisms. Some fear that the enhance powers conferred by new genetic engineering techniques might result in widespread displacement of existing species by man-made organisms, undermining our conceptions of wilderness and nature and fueling human hubris. Fears that human genetic applications of molecular engineering will be abused or will destroy our understanding of human individuality can engender hostility to all applications of molecular engineering. The law’s present response to biotechnology may seem paradoxical. Organisms created by the new molecular techniques are regulated far more stringently than organisms produced by the older techniques, even though there is no evidence that the risks posed by the new group are greater. Moreover, genetically engineered products, which thus far have not caused any known damage to human health or the environment, are regulated more stringently than documented hazards such as air pollutions. Several factors explain this paradox. Cultural attitudes and institutional forces tend to produce more restrictive legal controls on new technologies than on established one. Also, legal controls on technology respond not only to scientific evidence but also to popular perceptions of risk. Public attitudes toward the environmental, health, and safety risks of molecular engineering are ambivalent and often fearful. Such attitudes may be explained in part by a risk-averse stance toward the uncertainty posed by any new technology. Because molecular engineering is such a new technology, both the problem of uncertainty and the law’s difficulty in coping with it are especially great. Public attitudes about the risks of molecular engineering are also influenced by concern over second- and third-order consequences of its widespread use. Although such consequences are not the stated object of the regulatory laws dealing with biotechnology, which are limited to first-order environmental, health, and safety risks, these broader concerns exert a powerful gravitational influence on the law’s operation.
Source Publication
The Genetic Revolution: Scientific Prospects and Public Perceptions
Source Editors/Authors
Bernard D. Davis
Publication Date
1991
Recommended Citation
Stewart, Richard B., "Regulatory Law" (1991). Faculty Chapters. 1706.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1706
