Woman who serves as the voice of EU conscience

Date: 26/11/1998

By Renée Cordes

FOR the past seven years, Noelle Lenoir has been helping the European Commission to shape its policy on making babies - figuratively speaking.

Since 1991, she has been a member of the international expert panel which advises the Commission on ethical issues arising from cloning, gene manipulation and other biotechnological advances. In 1994, the French jurist took over as its leader.

Now the group's voice is set to become stronger. In July, it gained legal status in the Union and, with the impending dissolution of the Commission's own legal and ethics unit, the 12-member panel is set to emerge as the institution's predominant ethical conscience.

Last week, it issued a report stating that, while EU funding should not, in principle, exclude human embryo research, the Commission should comply with national regulations, such as the need to get approval from appropriate ethical committees, before offering resources.

In future, the group will not just look at biotechnology but at the ethical issues raised by all types of new technology.

“The Commission wants to show that new technologies are a big challenge because they are transforming society completely. New technologies control the way you make babies, the way you die and the way you eat. Biotechnology is one aspect of this new trend,” says Lenoir.

“These technologies not only transform our way of living, but also our way of thinking. Nowadays people can have a family in a form that is much more diverse - you even have homosexuals wanting to have babies.”

But such technological advances raise ethical questions which are far from easy to answer, warns Lenoir. “It makes you think of new rights which did not exist before.”

Now that people can be genetically tested for their predisposition to get certain diseases, for example, questions are being asked about whether they should have the right not to know. Scientific progress also raises the issue of whether new and often costly techniques can be made available to everybody.

“Even though the new technology can improve some aspects of your life, they can also create new inequality,” says Lenoir, who cites as an example the fact that, for purely socio-economic reasons, not everyone has access to prenatal diagnosis or new drugs developed through genetic engineering.

While her group does not have the power to create a level playing-field, it is seeking to get policy-makers to think about all sides of an issue before drafting laws which will affect people's daily lives, not just today, but possibly for several generations to come.