Munich

Bulmahn: wants laws friendly to research. Credit: PEPA

Germany's research minister Edelgard Bulmahn promised last week that new legislation on patents on genetic material would specify that they should be given a narrow interpretation.

The pledge came at a meeting attended by Bulmahn and the minister for legal affairs, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, as well as academics, industrialists and patent experts. The meeting discussed changes to Germany's patent laws that are to bring them in line with the European directive on the legal protection of biotechnology.

The commitment to the new legislation — which should have been approved by the end of last month — was welcomed by representatives from the biotechnology industry. “Harmonized European patent rules will give us the legal security we need,” says Thomas von Rüden, chief scientific officer of the Munich-based company MorphoSys.

But there was also agreement at the meeting that patents issued should be interpreted in a “narrow way”. This reflects concerns expressed last month by German scientists that broad gene patents could hinder the exploitation of newly discovered functions for DNA sequences (see Nature 406, 111; 2000).

Bulmahn said that the legal comments that would accompany the directive should encourage a “research-friendly” interpretation by national and European courts. Although not legally binding, these comments are aimed at guiding the interpretation of a law by the courts.

Some scientists oppose the idea that patents involving genetic information should get special treatment, believing that patents should be seen as incentives, rather than obstacles, to researchers.

But Detlev Ganten, scientific director of the Berlin-based Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, questions whether Bulmahn's concession goes far enough. “Gene patents should, on principle, be restricted to identified functions,” he says.