Technologies of Humility: Citizen Participation in Governing Science

Long before the terrorist atrocities of 11 September 2001 in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania, the anthrax attacks through the US mail, and the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, signs were mounting that America's ability to create and operate vast technological systems had outrun her capacity for prediction and control. In a prescient book, published in 1984, the sociologist Charles Perrow forecast a series of 'normal accidents', which were strung like dark beads through the latter years of the twentieth century and beyond — most notably, the 1984 chemical plant disaster in Bhopal, India; the 1986 loss of the Challenger shuttle and, in the same year, the nuclear plant accident in Chernobyl, USSR;…