Those are two terrific questions. I wanted to slip in one of them as a supplementary to my previous comment, so thanks for setting me up.
Let me answer the question about how the new toxicology will help. If we have these very cost-effective, highly efficient, high-throughput techniques, we could actually get data very quickly. We can run a particular agent through a series of 50, 100, or 200 assays in a range of levels at which we would see biological activity.
We also have advances in high-throughput exposure assessment. There is high-throughput biomonitoring, and high-throughput exposure characterization. I can show you some nice work from U.S. scientists that shows biological activity across a range of assays for a whole bunch of agents being up here, and exposure levels based on high-throughput [Inaudible—Editor] going down here. As long as I have a comfortable margin of safety between where I see biological activity in these high-throughput assays and the levels of anticipated human exposure—now I'm in a risk world—I'm feeling good, because levels at which biological response occurs are maybe a hundredfold or a thousandfold higher than any exposure. We might be able to get data that will help us move this a little out of the precautionary principle arena, where we don't have enough information, to actually make more risk decisions more cheaply and more effectively now than we could in the past.
That was an answer to the second of your two questions.
The first one is whether there are ways in which the precautionary principle can be applied in a risk context. To a certain extent, yes, there are. The Rio Declaration is quite conservative. The Wingspread version of the precautionary principle talks about a little less responsibility to demonstrate safety and a little more cost-effectiveness in its implementation. There are various interpretations, but I think those are subtle. The more important observation I would make is that the new science may get us the data we need to fill data gaps that previously were not going to be easily filled up.