Scientific expertise in the marketplace: Market expectations and the construction of toxicology methods in chemicals regulation in the United States
Une expertise de marché : anticipations marchandes et construction des méthodes toxicologiques dans la réglementation des produits chimiques aux États-Unis
Résumé
Risk assessment of products is often a prerequisite to authorize their placing on the market. This assessment is based on expert scientific evaluation, and is more and more frequently accused of putting industry interests first given the hold of the latter over the political economy of science. Building on the history of a risk assessment method for chemicals promoted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from as early as the 1980s-the modeling of structure-activity relationships-this article examines the respective roles of industry and government agencies in the design, use, and standardization of the scientific evaluation of products. The fact that the EPA's assessment work was progressively organized around structure-activity relationships-an approach previously used more frequently by the industry itself to develop new molecules-shows that this evaluation was the result of a series of intersecting expectations, on the part of industry actors and of the government agency in charge of its regulation, that related both to the nascent market and to the sum of the (uncertain) goods constituting it. Rather than agency capture on the part of industry, the case studied here shows how interactions between a government agency, scientists, and businesses contributed to the development of a market-oriented form of expert evaluation.
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