BRUSSELS, Belgium - "The European debate on stem cells concentrates so many ethical issues it has a symbolic significance," according to Noklle Lenoir, president of the European Commission's advisory group on ethics in science and the new technologies.

"We have just entered the age of the industrial use of the human body," she told BioWorld International. "More than with gene therapy or DNA, the use of stem cells as products means a new era, a new vision of the human body, a new economic conception of the use of the human body." And she made clear her view that Europe will have to face up to some fundamental questions as it deals with these new challenges.

Speaking after the roundtable she organized on stem cell research on June 26, she said Europe will have to find a way of reconciling this new technology with the existing body of European law, which generally presumes that there should be no commercialization of the human body. Lenoir, herself an eminent lawyer in Paris, takes the view that stem cell technology offers a new approach, utterly distinct from the use of blood or organs.

She has noted with interest U.S. arguments, such as the thesis widely defended in the U.S. that embryonic stem cells do not form an embryo. "And if you accept that, you must accept the consequences," she said.

For instance, she pointed out, there is an evident contradiction between European views on non-commercialization of the human body and the way that cells and genes and proteins are now starting to be used. There also is "something quite new" in working on embryos not for the purposes of in vitro fertilization but as material to make new products (the EU 1998 directive on biotechnology patents prohibits the industrial and commercial use of embryos).

"If Europe decides to join the U.S. in stem cell research, Europeans have to accept it will raise questions on patents and ethics and research in the long term," she stressed.

Lenoir's prediction is that as increased use is made of elements and products of the human body by researchers taking stem cells - adult and embryonic - and culturing, storing, cloning and multiplying them, Europeans will have to decide what kind of research they want to do and in which direction they want to go. Precisely because there is no immediate prospect of any products emerging from such research - "it could be decades, maybe never" - the debate has to be conducted in terms of the ethics of the research itself, she said.

Lenoir said she was struck by the extent to which leading political figures had recently started to take part in the broader ethical debate on new technologies, from U.S. President Bill Clinton's assurance that genetic testing would not be used in the workplace to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's insistence that the human genome must be in the public domain to French President Chirac's assurance that there would be no human cloning.

But she insisted that stem cell research was going to present additional obligations for decision making. "We have to decide right now," she said, "because in this industrial age of life sciences, patents are now an integral part of research practice, and we are now speaking of work on an industrial scale." Her advisory group has an important role in this debate, she claimed, because "we don't speak on behalf of anyone" - neither industry, nor patient groups, nor governments. "A disinterested voice is needed, because mere confrontation between governments and lobbyists will not produce the right result."

The next step in preparing the opinion on stem cell research that her group is due to publish this year - in October or November, she expects - is to talk with more private sector scientists "to learn more," including with the owners of the stem-cell patent awarded by the European Patent Office in December 1999 and now contested on the grounds that it contains human genetic material.

Lenoir admitted to some concern over the impact of public opinion and non-governmental organizations on the way that European Union biotechnology regulation in general is being conducted.

"EU authorities are prevented from having a clear view" by the intense public debate, she said. The answer is for the ethical dimension to be an integral part of the biotechnology policy discussion. She also called for moves to create wider international understanding. She has been appointed as one of the members of the EU-U.S. biotechnology dialogue group created at the May 31 EU-U.S. summit, and wants to make it work. "We need to seek a clearer understanding of the areas where they don't understand how we think, and they don't understand how we think."