David Rosner Quotes

Colombia, Professor
March 13, 1947

David Rosner is the Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and professor of history in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. He is also Co-Director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine in 2010.

We haven't developed what some have called the precautionary principle which will say look, if there's a reason, if a product is safe, that's fine, but it's really the responsibility of an industry to tell us it's safe and to make sure it's safe. It's not our responsibility to wait until the damage is done.

David Rosner
We've had a century in which we've allowed some industries to basically pollute the air, pollute the water, pollute the ground, pollute the rivers, and we've been trying sporadically to clean air acts and ways of regulating them. But we now are sitting in a world that's filled with all sorts of materials that we don't really know the impact of. It's not like they're necessarily all poisonous but it's odd to put all these materials into our environment and watch.

David Rosner
- World
- Trying
- Water