Measured by patents or Nobel prizes, we are still a technological dynamo. But increasingly, the marketplace tells a different story. Anguished administrative agencies delay for years the introduction of new technologies. When an innovation does finally make it to the market, it is assaulted a second time by a liability system relentlessly hostile to all that is technologically unfamiliar. Bendectin, to take one example, was recently the best drug on the market to combat morning sickness.
Old technologies bear regulatory and judicial burdens, too, but the newer ones are handicapped.
That's because the old is innocent until proven guilty, while the new is guilty until proven innocent. Under the Toxic Substances Control Act, a company must obtain Environmental Protection Agency approval before manufacturing or marketing a new chemical. The same goes for pesticides. Selective breeding of plants and animals is unregulated. The process, as Alfred North Whitehead once observed, quickly becomes the reality.