German Biopatent Law Rejects the EU

Unlike their EU peers,Germany appears ready to reject broad patent protection for gene sequences.

Joseph Straus, managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition, and Tax Law, told The Scientist that a biotechnology amendment approved last Friday (December 3) by Germany's Bundestag, or lower house of Parliament, would limit patent protection on human gene sequences to "disclosed functions" at the time of the patent application.

California DNA Law Worrisome Threat to Privacy

In a move that has privacy advocates worried, California voters approved proposition 69, an aggressive DNA-collection program. The new law, officially called the DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act, will collect data from anyone convicted of, or arrested for a felony. It is expected to add the genetic data of about a million people to California's databank over the five years, making it the largest state-run DNA databank in the country.

Juv Diabetes Res Foundation Celebrates Bush Signing of Islet Cell Transplant Act of 2004

From their office:

The JDRF Government Relations team is very pleased to announce the Pancreatic Islet Cell Transplantation Act of 2004 was signed into law by President Bush on October 25, 2004. This important piece of legislation passed through both houses of Congress and reached the President's desk thanks in no small part to the hard work of JDRF advocates across the country. Your efforts to educate members of Congress on the promise of islet cell transplantation and ask for their support were crucial in ensuring the bill's success. The Pancreatic Islet Cell Transplantation Act of 2004 will increase the supply of pancreata for islet transplantation and improve the coordination of federal efforts and information regarding islet cell transplantation. The recent progress made with islet cell transplantation is featured in the current Winter 2004 issue of JDRF's Countdown magazine. Thank you for all the calls and visits made, and letters and emails sent in support of the Pancreatic Islet Cell Transplantation Act of 2004. Once again, the efforts of JDRF advocates have translated into tangible results for the more than 1 million Americans living with Type 1 diabetes.

France on hES: Here Come the Cells

CordesNews reports that France is set to import hES cells under its new "law on bioethics", passed in July of this year. "Supernumerary frozen human embryos conceived in vitro and without a parental project" may be used to derive cells, create lines and in experiments utilizining the derived cells.

Grow a GM Crop, Go to California Jail

Not everything in California is about stem cells these days. Breaking News Technology section of the Globe and Mail is reporting a new wave of statutes in California counties banning, well, everything about GM crops. The laws are up November 2nd and many have quite significant criminal penalties. This is a first in the U.S.

Constitutional Cloning Take 2- Wesley Smith & Brian Alexander

A couple of days ago we found Brian Alexander's Times magazine piece on the First Amendment and rights to research, specifically rights to clone. Brian commented that we were a bit too harsh. Now Wesley Smith comes to the debate with a quickly penned response to Alexander in the Weekly Standard. If you are scratching your head about the comments by Leon Kass in the Alexander essay, to the effect that Kass would "rather not think about" the constitutionality question, don't despair. Smith is only too happy to clarify the evils of a 1st Amendment argument. This is truly new territory for the neocon bioethics crowd - kind of like their adventure in human nature theory - and it makes for great reading.

UPDATE: NYT on Cloning and First Amendment

Brian Alexander, one of the best of the "bioethics essayists" to emerge in the past five years, helps the Times' Magazine make a first foray by a newspaper into one of the more interesting questions concerning current and pending laws governing both cloning and embryo research: could they survive an appellate court review? Is it unconstitutional (or wrong) to restrict scientific experimentation on the grounds that such a restriction violates freedom of expression? Brian quotes Robertson, Kass and Sunstein on the analogy between experimentation and reporting. Brian tells us the Times' editors cut his interview with Lori Andrews on her great work on the specific issue of the constitutionality of cloning per se. I wondered about why the piece didn't mention the important FDA policy prohibiting cloning that aims at gestation; Brian says the editors cut that too.