The most ambitious attempt to make fundamental changes in the structure that regulates new technologies is being offered by ETC Group, which is calling for an international convention on the public's right to accept or decline new technology -- the International Convention on the Evaluation of New Technologies. This step, which essentially calls for the politicization of scientific and technological progress, has long been an objective of anti-chemicals and anti-biotechnology advocates. Some of these advocates have relied on a radical interpretation of the precautionary principle, which argues simply that a new product should be "proven safe" before it is allowed on the market. Taken to its logical extreme, of course, this would stifle all new technology by demanding that creators prove a negative (that it is not possible for their products to be harmful). This clearly being the case, the only way to certify that the negative "no harm" has been achieved would be to turn to political judgments, rather than scientific ones.
The precautionary principle desribed above is actually the intersection of two fundamental (and all too common) logical fallacies: (1) to measure the costs without regard for the gains, and (2) to demand nothing less than certainty in a fundamentally uncertain world.
But all that, after all, may be irrelevant, if the proponents of the principle are only interested in a prohibition based on a 'moral' (ideological, religious) absolute, while looking to cloak it in the vocabulary of a cost-benefit "rationality" that they in fact reject.
This is both the strength and the weakness of fanaticism. It's not possible to argue with a fanatic. On the other hand, once most people recognize the fanatic for what she is, the fanatic loses.
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