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Crossing Bridges at High Speed. On the Future of Risk Research

In Chapter XXVIII of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, the train driver, egged on by enthusiastic US passengers and despite objections by Passepartout, reverses his train to cross a wobbly bridge (successfully) at high speed. With all passengers on board. It is a favourite chapter of ours and one which comes in handy in risk management classes. Passepartout did not suggest that the driver not try to cross the bridge. Rather, he wanted to minimise risk exposure to the passengers. Why put the whole train at risk if the passengers could disembark and the driver could later carry out the tricky manoeuvre? (The passengers could walk around the gorge.) In classes we use this chapter as an example of the different approach in risk management between the EU (Passepartout; he’s French) and the US (the train driver, conductor and most of the passengers are North Americans). In the end, both the Europeans and the Americans tend to cross the bridge. Yet they often have a different route to get there. Neither of the authors can claim that when we read Around the World... as children, we dreamed of a career in the study of risk. Our interest in risk arose initially as a result of our background in trade law (in the case of first author) and general EU law and policy (second author). Representing a client in the biotech sector, we were asked in the mid 1990s to monitor and advise on the evolving EU regulatory landscape for biotechnology. One fairly quickly realises that unless one can call upon the talents and skills of a multidisciplinary team, it is very challenging truly to appreciate the detail of risk identification, management and communication.