History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Franc Mali
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
The Recent Dilemmas of Social and Legal Regulations of Biotechnology
I’ll present in my paper some dilemmas of social and legal regulation of life sciences and biotechnology in Europe in recent time. In the visions of the key policy-decision makers, the life sciences and biotechnology should create new opportunities for new European knowledge-based society. In that sense, the leading EU institutions increasingly expose the need to utilize economic potential of life sciences and biotechnology. It cannot be also forgotten that the intellectual property regime in Europe has been never subjected only to a branch of economy, but to a branch of ethics as well. In my contribution, I’ll try to argue that common EU regulatory structure does not foster itself cross-national patent propensity in biosciences and biotechnology. Looking at the data in the last Eurostat’s statistical analysis about national patent indicators (Statistics in focus – Science and technology, 9/2004), it seems that the significant upward trend of bio-patents didn’t refer to the new EU Member States. Although the new EU-Member States have made substantial progress in social and legal regulation of inventions in biotechnology (these countries were required to adopt the acquis communautaire in this field), the accurate statistical data show that there still exists a large diversity among Eastern and Western part of Europe in use and social perception of inventions in biotechnology. In reviewing some newest trends in the processes of commercialization of life sciences and biotechnology in the new EU-Member States, I’ll try to answer on the following basic questions: what is the real influence of EU-Directives on the social and legal regulation of life sciences and biotechnology in the new EU-Member States? What kinds of social values guide the policy decisions concerning the further development of life sciences and biotechnology in the new EU-Member States? Last but not least, what role does play in these processes the public opinion in particular countries, which is increasingly changing in the important factor of blocking (or triggering) the commercialization of inventions in field of biotechnology? In the paper, I’ll try to give the explanation of these questions with the use of different analytical sources as well as empirical observations.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006