Conservation science, relationship

Precaution and Environmental Science. When the precautionary principle is discussed in its relationship to science, it is often portrayed as an antiscience or a risk-management principle that is only used after undergoing conventional scientific processes. As discussed earlier, in practice the limitations of science to characterize complex risks show that precaution is not at odds (Kriebel et al., 2001). Further, precaution is not just about additional safety factors or changing risk assessment default assumptions. Research by U.S. EPA scientists has demonstrated that many of the EPA s Reference Doses - or conservative safe exposures - may correspond to risks of greater than 1 in 1000, meaning that safety factors alone may not protect health (Castorina and Woodruff, 2003). 

It is from this perspective that the National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored a workshop entitled Periodic patterns, relationships and categories of well-defined nanoscale building blocks in 2007 [136]. This seminal workshop evolved an embryonic consensus that subsequently led to a proposed concept for defining and unifying nanoscience based on the integration of traditional chemistiy first principles with certain critical hierarchical design parameters (CHDPs) [137,138]. These CHDPs include size, shape, surface chemistiy, flexibOity/rigidity, composition, and architecture and appear to be conserved and transferred as a function of complexity (illustrated in Fig. 14). 

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