REVIEW article
Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
Sec. Biosafety and Biosecurity
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2025.1647204
This article is part of the Research TopicInsights In Biosafety & Biosecurity 2024/2025: Novel Developments, Current Challenges, and Future PerspectivesView all 9 articles
A Comparative Study on the Governance Approaches for Biotechnological Risks
Provisionally accepted
- Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The governance approaches for biotechnological risks mainly include the laissez-faire approach, which emphasizes "technology first" but suffers from lagging governance; the preventive approach, which emphasizes "safety first" and uses quantitative risk-benefit analysis as the main method in a single dimension; and the precautionary approach, which also emphasizes "safety first" but has three dimensions of cognition, procedure, and action, and is characterized by forward-looking and proportionality. Emerging biotechnologies are developing rapidly while being filled with a large amount of uncertainty, which increases the complexity of potential biotechnological risks. The precautionary approach, which emphasizes cultivating a cautious awareness and future responsibility in cognition, reversing the burden of proof in procedure, and ensuring that the level of precautionary measures is proportionate to the level of risk in action, is conducive to dealing with various risks including uncertainty risks and meets the needs of biotechnological risks governance, providing a strong theoretical guarantee for the balance between technological progress and social security development.
Keywords: emerging biotechnology, biotechnological risks, governance, the laissez-faire approach, the preventive approach, the precautionary approach
Received: 15 Jun 2025; Accepted: 26 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yuexin Wang, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.