BRUSSELS, Belgium - The European Parliament plans to create a temporary committee of inquiry on human genetics and other new technologies in modern medicine by the end of 2000, "to enable it exercise its political responsibilities."

Its composition and mandate have yet to be decided, but the terms of reference include completing a broad inventory of new and potential developments in human genetics and their uses; examining the ethical, legal, economic and social problems posed by new and potential developments and uses; recommending how far restrictions should be imposed in the public interest; and providing guidance for the European Parliament and other EU institutions on research in human genetic and other new technologies.

The committee will start working in January, and 12 months later will submit a report to the Parliament to frame the political context of decision-making on medical research across Europe.

In other European news:

¿ The European Parliament's committee on industry, external trade, research and energy is preparing a report on the future of biotechnology. This "own-initiative" report - covering industrial issues, ethics, intellectual property and science and research - will not be legally binding, but is expected to have political impact. After discussions in the committee in December and January, the report is scheduled to go for discussion in the Parliament's plenary in February.

¿ Dutch and UK Socialist Euro-MPs Dorette Corbey and David Bowe, who is drafting the European Parliament's final views on the draft update to EU rules on release of GMOs into the environment, plan to meet every month to discuss different aspects of biotechnology. One of the meetings, scheduled for Jan. 9, will be devoted to medical/pharmaceutical biotechnology in the EU. The main purpose of the working group is to identify differences of opinion between stakeholders and interest groups in biotechnology.

¿ The biotechnology unit in the European Commission's Enterprise directorate general is working on a paper that will establish general principles on what the Commission should be doing in the field of biotechnology. Neither the content nor the form of this paper has yet been decided.

¿ Leading European scientists have called for new methods for assessing the risks presented by multiple gene modifications. The European Union's scientific steering committee published on Thursday an opinion addressing risk assessment for genetically modified plants. The committee said better assessment of long-term and delayed effects is needed. It also urged an early warning system on emerging risks and uncertainties, among a series of new strategies for dealing with emerging and re-emerging scientific issues that may impact human health in the near future. The scientists suggested that arrangements should be made to ensure that emerging risks and uncertainties in risk assessment are regularly reviewed by a multidisciplinary committee of scientists. They also say that more contact is desirable between scientists and stakeholders to discuss communication on emerging risks and uncertainties in risk assessment.

¿ Further conflict can be anticipated within the EU's tangled biotechnology regulatory context now that scientists have publicly disagreed on the merits of GM maize. The European Union's scientific committee on plants published an opinion Thursday that flatly rejected German anxieties over the product from Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis). The product has been the subject of a sequence of appeals since the Commission's 1997 decision to allow the maize onto the market and to permit unrestricted cultivation. Austria immediately objected, and Germany said in April 2000 that the placing on the market of the genetically modified maize line and its progeny was suspended in that country except where cultivation is intended for research and testing. Germany invoked the safeguard clause in EU authorization rules. The committee examined the scientific information submitted by the German authorities to substantiate its decision, and found it insufficient to alter or invalidate the original risk assessment of the product made in 1996, which formed the basis for the approval. The committee said this conclusion applies not only to the specific Bt maize under consideration, but to all other Bt products it already evaluated.