3. The crisis of the standard model and the emergence of the precautionary principle

3.1 A critical look at society

The 1980s saw a number of health crises in the medical (contaminated blood), food (bovine spongiform encephalopathy BSE, listeriosis, dioxin, etc.) and environmental (asbestos, Sevezo, etc.) fields. Political and social crises, these crises also appear to be crises of expertise, insofar as the phenomena in question seem to have been underestimated, or even frankly ignored, at least initially, by the experts. If we analyze these failures of expertise, several causes can be identified:

• in some fields, the pace of research can be slow to keep pace with innovation. The Kourilsky-Viney report