A chara, - It is ironic that, whilst acknowledging that public demand for biotechnological medical advances is at an unprecedented level, your editorial (May 14th) welcomes the adoption of the European Biopatenting Directive.Far from promoting such advances, the directive will consolidate the control of the raw materials required for such research in the hands of a tiny number of corporations. This will act as a disincentive to such research. How much money will scientific institutions and pharmaceutical companies have to pay to the US multinational that decodes the human genome in the year 2002 for a range of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures? Such royalties will lead to increased medicinal costs.Your editorial failed to mention biopiracy. This directive sanctions the theft of seeds, agricultural and medicinal techniques from the Third World. To add insult to injury it then sanctions the charging of royalties to the original developers. This generation recoils in horror at the plunder of the Americas in the seventeenth century. Those colonisers stole gold and silver. This directive sanctions the theft of life forms. Sadly all the Irish MEPs, with the exception of Ms Malone, Ms Ahern, and Ms McKenna, voted against this whilst Ms Banotti did not vote at all. Your readers should know that there is tremendous opposition to biopiracy among development organisations in Ireland and in the Third World. Fifty of the official delegates at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity this week called on MEPs to support an amendment preventing biopiracyprior to the vote.Your editorial writer denigrates those who oppose the directive by stating it was "paraded as a `patent on life' ". What else is the patenting of genes, cells, plants and animals, if not the patenting of life? When Chakrabarty initially applied for a patent on a genetically engineered microbe in the US in 1971, it was clearly recognised by all sides that what was at stake was patenting life. The complete turnaround by the majority of Irish MEPs on this legislation since they first vociferously rejected a virtually identical draft in 1995 is testimony to the strength and power of the biotechnology industry. Small wonder, as you correctly note in your final paragraph, that the most intensive lobbying came from the biotechnology industry. They are the only winners here. - Yours, etc.,Sean McDonagh, Niamh Gaynor,Voice, Pembroke Street, Dublin 2.