The Interplay of Science and Values in Assessing and Regulating Environmental Risks

In the late 1970s, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed a standard for identifying, classifying, and regulating carcinogens.' The hearings for the standard attracted the largest number of participants in OSHA's rulemaking history and lasted for two months (May and June 1978). Although a standard was never implemented, OSHA's efforts stimulated a debate over the assumptions and decisionmaking process for assessing and regulating cancer risks which continues today. This debate about the methods for identifying and estimating occupational cancer risks appears at first to be predominantly scientific, but an analysis of the responses to OSHA's proposal led me to hypothesize that regulatory values and other social and political values influenced the selection among scientific assumptions and, furthermore, that these regulatory values seemed linked to place of employment. To test these hypotheses, I designed an empirical study that explored the impact of regulatory values, institutional affiliation, and other social and political attributes on occupational health scientists' selection among assumptions used in the OSHA standard. I conducted 136 interviews with occupational physicians and industrial hygienists working for industry, academia, and government. This article describes some of the results of that study and focuses on the role of science and scientists in the decisionmaking process for determin-