Dissatisfied with the latest draft European Union directive on protection of biotechnological inventions, members of France's National Assembly have produced a version balancing respect for human integrity with the need to face US and Japanese competition.
The text with which the Assembly started was drawn from talks in the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers. Gaullist MP Jean-Francois Mattei, National Assembly rapporteur for the EU, said he had expected a general text, but found a purely technical one which put vegetable, animal and human on the same plane. The parliamentarians seem agreed that the draft fails to take account of the ethical demands which any form of licensing of living matter imposes.
The Assembly members' report says that "the human body, its elements and its products, together with knowledge of the total or partial structure of genes, cannot in their natural state be made the objective of licenses." What can be licensed is a discovery capable of industrial application "which bears on an isolated element of the human body or which is otherwise produced by a technical procedure, even if the structure of this element is identical to that of a natural element." Licensing would require a contract between donor and recipient or moral beneficiary.
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