MEPs support legal protection in EU for biotechnology inventions

Date: 17/07/1997

EU-WIDE rules to provide legal protection throughout the Union for biotechnological inventions cleared their first major hurdle this week when they were approved by the European Parliament.

MEPs' readiness to support the legislation yesterday (16 July) was in sharp contrast to their decision more than two years ago to reject an earlier draft because of fears that it would open the door to controversial experiments on the human body.

Acknowledging those earlier concerns, Internal Market Commissioner Mario Monti told Euro MPs: “Our central objective was to meet the concerns as expressed then and to mark out guidelines and reference points which were previously not sufficiently clear. We want to ensure that the interests of all concerned are guaranteed.”

German Socialist MEP Willi Rothley, who has laboured on various versions of the draft legislation for almost a decade, insisted patent protection was essential if jobs were to be created and if the Union was not to fall behind in biotechnological research and leave the market to the United States and Japan.

“We have this practice world-wide and what we are trying to do is to have stable patent legislation at European level,” he said, stressing to critics of the proposals that diagnostic and therapeutic procedures or parts of the human body could not be patented.

However, MEPs were divided over the degree to which the new legislation, which must now be examined by governments and again by the Parliament before it reaches the statute books, should be concerned with ethical issues.

While Rothley argued that such questions could not be dealt with by patent law, a large number of members across the political spectrum took the opposite view.

British Socialist MEP Ian White, contrasting the hopes of parents seeking a cure for children suffering from cystic fibrosis with those wishing to select certain features in their offspring, maintained that biotechnological advances presented ethical dilemmas.

These had not been taken on board in the previous proposal, he said, arguing that an ethics committee should be a central part of the new procedure.

His Socialist colleague David Martin conceded that the Parliament had got it wrong when it killed the earlier proposal in 1995.

He said the new version balanced a genuine need to protect invention and inventors, while also safeguarding patients' rights and giving them the hope that cures would be found for previously incurable diseases.

One of the draft legislation's most vocal opponents, German Green Claudia Roth, impressed on her colleagues that human rights and the freedom to carry out research - and not just economic growth and jobs - were at stake.

“We want social responsibility. If you separate politics from morality, you get immoral politics,” she warned.

As pressure groups on both sides of the argument watched the debate from the sidelines, speakers - almost without exception - commented on the unprecedented degree of lobbying they had experienced in recent months.