The National Science Foundation, The National Institute of Occupational
Safety and Health, and the Center for Technology and Humanities at
Georgia State University sponsored a two-day national conference on
Moral Issues and Public Policy Issues in the Use of the Method of
Quantitative Risk Assessment ( QRA) on September 26 and 27, 1985, in
Atlanta, Georgia. The purpose of the conference was to promote
discussion among practicing risk assessors, senior government health
officials extensively involved in the practice of QRA, and moral
philosophers familiar with the method. The conference was motivated by
the disturbing fact that distinguished scientists ostensibly employing
the same method of quantitative risk assessment to the same substances
conclude to widely varying and mutually exclusive assessments of safety,
depending on which of the various assumptions they employ when using the
method. In short, the conference was motivated by widespread concern
over the fact that QRA often yields results that are quite controversial
and frequently contested by some who, in professedly using the same
method, manage to arrive at significantly different estimates of risk.