BRUSSELS, Belgium ¿ The European Parliament¿s temporary committee on human genetics and modern medicine resumes its work in Brussels Monday, as it starts on the last lap of its program to produce a final report on the social, legal, ethical and economic implications of human genetics by the end of this year.

The plan is to hold a first discussion of a new document that will be presented by the committee¿s draftsman, Italian Euro-MP Francesco Fiori. Thereafter, the committee will have a series of weekly meetings aiming to agree to the report by early November and to allow for discussion and adoption by the European Parliament as a whole at a plenary meeting in Brussels Nov. 28-29.

Fiori already has indicated some of the principal conclusions he intends to draw from the discussions that the committee started at the beginning of this year. He sees a leading role for the European Union itself in shaping the context for work on human genetics. Above all, he said in the latest draft of his own working document, the EU should help foster discussion among research workers and all areas of society on how national policies on human genetics should be harmonized or complemented at the European level.

He said EU-wide ethical guidelines are necessary for human genetics, along with an EU system of regulation to govern the development, trials and approval of new biomedical products and genetic testing.

Public debate has to be intensified, and involve patients and their families, industry, investors, ethics experts and the public at large, he said. He even projected a ¿European model¿ on consensus building that could be used in an international context.

His draft report will be generally supportive in tone. Fiori said a climate should be established to help foster innovation regarding the genome, with easier access to venture capital and stronger promotion of entrepreneurs and technology transfer. Financial support for research should help cooperation among university researchers, doctors, entrepreneurs and the industry to help identify the role of genome data and to develop new medical treatments. Support should also be granted for quality assessment standards and quality guarantees for genetic testing. And centralized information systems should be funded, for instance, to provide data on new biomedical products, including clinical trial data, subsequent approval, adverse reactions, correlation of genetic specificity with individual reactions to drugs, patient databanks and central tissue banks, Fiori suggested.

However, the temporary committee also is planning to take account of a parallel debate elsewhere in the Parliament on the EU¿s upcoming sixth research framework program, which may provide upwards of $4 billion in research funding for biotechnology over the next five years. The Parliament¿s committee on industry, trade and research is developing a report on this program, with particular attention to biotechnology.

The most recent inputs to this committee¿s developing views show sharply divided opinions over how to deal with biotechnology and genetics. A mid-summer hearing of experts opposed the views of Freek Heidekamp, a research consultant from the Netherlands, who spoke of the benefits of genomics and biotechnology for health, and those of Mae-Wan Ho of the Institute of Science in Society in the United Kingdom, who wanted to see less EU support for biotechnology research.

Heidekamp called on the Parliament to better integrate genomics into food safety and nutrition. He stressed the potential of biotechnology for combating aging and reducing health care costs but emphasized that this could not be done without proper research. He also pointed out that the EU was lagging behind the U.S. in funding levels, particularly in relation to biotechnology¿s contribution to health care. While the EU was proposing that around $2 billion should be put into genomics and biotechnology for health from 2002 to 2006, the annual U.S. federal budget for that is nearly double that level.

But Mae-Wan Ho was critical of proposed subsidies to what she termed ¿failing areas of corporate science that were not in the public interest,¿ in which she included genomics and biotechnology. The approach proposed by genomics and biotechnology reduced practically every human disease to genetic factors and did not take social and environmental factors into account, she claimed, describing genomics as ¿the culmination of reductionist medicine.¿ She favored a holistic model of health to support safe and effective health care. She also claimed that genetically modified food had been rejected by the public in Europe and that consumers were turning increasingly toward organic farming. She questioned the appropriateness of promoting research in this field when it was clearly something Europeans did not want.

The committee is likely to adopt its draft report in September or October, so that it can be put to the vote of the Parliament as a whole in plenary session in October or November.