The management of health risks related to scientific and technological innovations has been the focus of a heated debate for a few years now. In some cases, like the campaigns against the use of GMOs in agriculture, this debate has degenerated into a political and social dispute. Even risk analysis studies, which appeared in the 1970s in the fields of nuclear physics and engineering and were later developed by social sciences as well, have given completely different, and at times contradictory, interpretations that, in turn, have given rise to bitter controversies.
A physicist. That is what John Ziman was in the beginning. As he tells us in “On being a physicist,” this implies a kind of nationality, that is, a laboriously learned identity that, at the end of the day, becomes natural. Physics was for him a way of seeing and a way of thinking, inextricably embedded in his own being: “a deeply rooted mode of personal existence.”