Day 038 - 19 Oct 94 - Page 10

     
     1   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  No.  I will take it as if Dr. Millstone had
     2        said on his affirmation in the witness box what he says in
     3        the statement you handed to me this morning and in the two
     4        page facts relating to styrene.
     5
     6   MR. MORRIS:  I think we are going to deal with the general
     7        matters first.
     8
     9   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  You take your own course, but that is in
    10        evidence.
    11
    12   MS. STEEL:   OK.  (To the witness):  Your written statement
    13        indicates that you disagree with the official evaluations
    14        of particular additives that we are discussing in the
    15        court.  Could you explain why that is?
    16        A.  Yes, I certainly can.  When I first became interested
    17        in this area 20 years ago, in the spring of 1974, I started
    18        with the assumption (which is perhaps the official version,
    19        official account, of these matters) that policy making was
    20        relatively straightforward and that it could be neatly
         divided into two compartments; the first, scientific
    22        judgment in which scientists were able to determine more or
    23        less unambiguously and unequivocally what is and what is
    24        not safe; secondly, a stage at which that evidence was
    25        taken into account by policy makers who could rely upon the
    26        precision and accuracy of the scientific evidence with
    27        which to decide what to permit and what to forbid.
    28
    29        But, the longer I looked into these matters, the more
    30        closely I investigated them, I came to the conclusion that
    31        that was simply not the case.  Firstly, I came to the
    32        conclusion that scientists are certainly not in a position,
    33        for the most part, to provide definitive advice to policy
    34        makers as to what is and what is not safe, not merely which
    35        compounds are or are not safe but, moreover, the levels at
    36        which they might or might not be safe.
    37
    38        I was rather surprised when I felt driven to the conclusion
    39        that considerations of a not entirely scientific nature
    40        were themselves intruding into the ways in which the
         scientific evidence was being generated, interpreted,
    42        presented and utilized.
    43
    44        So, I became convinced that the scientific evidence is
    45        characterised by an immense amount of uncertainty,
    46        uncertainty which is, for the most part, concealed rather
    47        than revealed and, in the policy making process, what was
    48        happening was that particular judgments were being made as
    49        to how the benefit of the doubt should be awarded, where
    50        there was some evidence that under some circumstances a 
    51        compound might be hazardous, say, to some laboratory 
    52        animal.  There was then a question about whether one should 
    53        assume that that evidence directly indicated there would be
    54        an adverse effect on people or whether one might discount
    55        that and say, "That is only what happens to laboratory
    56        animals and is of little or no relevance to humans".
    57
    58        I came to the conclusion that what was happening, time and
    59        time again, in many, many cases, was that when compounds
    60        were being tested in model systems, such as bacteria and