The Risks of Nanomedicine and the Precautionary Principle

Abstract

In a famous passage of his Pensées which aims to emphasize the need for humility about our limited capacities, Pascal calls the attention to the fact that we as human beings are engulfed between two infinite spaces, the infinitely great of the cosmos and the infinitely small of the microcosmic world. And he adds: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me” (“Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie”) (n° 187).