The European Parliament, in a rebuff to Europe's biotechnology industry, yesterday rejected a directive that would have granted legal protection to patents on life forms.
The defeat of the directive, nearly seven years in the making, surprised opponents and supporters. The industry had lobbied hard for acceptance, arguing that patent protection is necessary to encourage research. Environmentalists responded that patenting life forms was unethical and an offence to human dignity.
The decision by the Socialist group to vote against appears to have been decisive, and after an emotional debate the directive was rejected by a vote of 240 to 188, with 23 abstentions. This is the first time that the Parliament has used its new powers to kill a piece of European Union legislation.
The defeat was not expected, because the final text of the directive had been negotiated under the process of conciliation introduced by the Maastricht treaty. This enabled the Parliament to make amendments to the text proposed by the Commission, and should have made final endorsement a formality.
Many MEPs remained dissatisfied with the text, which would have allowed patents on human genes so long as they were obtained in such a way that they could not be linked to any specific individual. The directive would also have allowed patents on "transgenic" animals and on plants.
In practice, the vote is unlikely to have a dramatic effect, because the granting of patents is in the hands of a non-EU body, the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich, and individual patent offices in the member countries.
Opponents of gene patenting last night insisted, however, that the vote would be influential in providing an ethical lead. "I am pleased and surprised at the vote," said Robin Jenkins, of the Genetics Forum, a pressure group.
"The draft directive was very bad, muddled nonsense, and had it gone through it would have encouraged the EPO to grant patents to many things that are discoveries, rather than inventions." Mr Jenkins said the patent system was being used to protect the means of production rather than the product. "This is like a car manufacturer preventing other people from copying not his latest models, but the factories used to make them."
An industry group official said the main result would be that biotechnology companies would be afraid to invest in Europe and would turn instead to Japan and the United States. Daniel Rahier, the deputy secretary-general of the Senior Advisory Group on Biotechnology, said: "It's a very bad signal for European industry."
Dr Nick Scott-Ram of British Biotechnology, chairman of the Bioindustry Association's intellectual property committee, was more sanguine. He said that he did not see the defeat of the directive as a disaster for the industry. "We will continue to work under the European Patent Convention," he said.
Greenpeace said the vote proved that the Parliament was taking control of the situation. It was "a decisive step" to uphold morality and to defend nature.
The vote is a mark of the growing gap between parliaments and the industry over how biotechnology inventions should be protected. The Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology is investigating human genetics, and members have said they believe that DNA sequences genes should be deemed to be "pure knowledge" and hence not patentable.
