Many find this definition alarmingly vague. You wouldn't be able to work on new drugs, new airplanes, any new technologies. You can't prove that anything is 100 percent safe. Proponents of the principle want to regulate that all new technologies and practices be shown to do no harm before being allowed into the marketplace. Essentially, all products would undergo pre-market reviews similar to the FDA approval process for pharmaceuticals.
Critics draw historic parallels.
Yet the precautionary principle is already making inroads in the federal government. In February, the precautionary principle was explicitly incorporated in the Biosafety Protocol that will regulate international trade in biotech products. The European Commission used it to ban importation of U.S. biotech crops. And a global campaign to get it incorporated as a bedrock principle of international law was unveiled by Steven Rockefeller, who heads the Earth Charter initiative, at the State of the World Forum during the U.N.'s Millennium Summit in August. In other words, all new activities and technologies are guilty until proven innocent.