Sir, - Genetic resources and their economic control, are the key questions of the coming millennium. The EU directive on biopatenting allows all living plants and animals to become an industrial product. Even human life is exploited by this directive. The genetic resources of our planet will be plundered. The Greens have opposed this directive for 10 years in the European Parliament. To photocopy the genes of plants, animals and human beings and then declare this to be an invention, is a travesty of science. The pressure that industry has exerted on politicians in order to ensure that the patent system includes living material has been unprecedented. Patent convention has, in the past, drawn a clear line between inventions, and discoveries, which were not patentable. This directive will change all this. The EU has adopted a conflicting proposal which appears to both allow and prohibit the patenting of the human genome which will become the subject of a legal challenge to the European Court.
The directive has serious implications for our access to medicine. Our genes, cells and body parts will become the monopoly property of the companies that hold the patents on them. For example, the granting of a patent on umbilical cord blood could deny access to these blood cells to anyone unable to pay for them. Hospital laboratories will also be under threat of closure as they will be unable to find the money for the multiplicity of royalties which will now be demanded.
The Irish Government in the Council of Ministers agreed to the deletion of a European Parliament amendment which called for firm evidence of prior informed consent of access to any biological resources (human, plant, animal) to be given by a patent applicant. Third World countries have described this as a belligerent action by the EU Council of Ministers. We have not heard the last of this and when the enormity of what has been agreed begins to dawn, the Irish Government and those members of the European Parliament who supported this directive, will have a shameful directive to explain to the people. - Yours, etc., Nuala Ahern, MEP,
Greystones, Co Wicklow.