PARIS - French geneticist Jean-Frangois Mattii, who is a deputy in the French National Assembly and a member of the Council of Europe, is leading a counterattack against a provision of the European biotechnology directive of July 1998 that would permit the patenting of parts of the human genome.

Together with a German member of the Council of Europe, Wolfgang Wodarg, Mattii launched a petition against the patenting of human genes in April, and it has already attracted more than 3,000 signatures, including some well-known members of the French scientific community.

The directive in question - No. 98/44/CE - is due to be transposed into the national legislation of European Union member states by July 6, but one clause now is thought to conflict with the French law on bioethics enacted in 1994, which prohibits the patenting of human genes. While article 5 of the directive similarly stipulates that "the human body . . . including the sequence or the partial sequence of a gene, cannot constitute patentable inventions," the following clause seems to contradict that general statement of principle: ''An isolated element of the human body, or otherwise produced by a technical process, including the sequence or the partial sequence of a gene, can constitute a patentable invention, even if the structure of that element is identical to that of a natural element.''

Describing that "clever drafting" of the text as an "ethical slippage," Mattii summed up his thinking with a clever maxim: "In biotechnology, you can patent the technology, not the bio." Among other things, he thinks Myriad Genetics should not have been permitted to patent the BCRA1 gene indicating predisposition to breast cancer.

France has not yet drafted the necessary articles for transposing the European biotechnology directive into French law, partly because it has a habit of applying European legislation several months after the deadline. France is due to take over the presidency of the European Union for a six-month period starting July 1, and Mattii is planning to let his petition run until September, when he intends to present it to President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.

Jospin recently intervened in the row over the Hyola rapeseed containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that the Canadian company Advanta Seeds supplied to farmers in France and several other European countries. He was faced with a public split between two government ministers. Agriculture Minister Jean Glavany dismissed the affair as a "storm in a teacup," since the GMO content of the seed was less than 1 percent, and that only 600 hectares of it had been planted out of the total of 1.2 million hectares of rapeseed under cultivation in France, while Environment Minister Dominique Voynet called for the crops concerned to be destroyed to prevent any risk of environmental contamination.

The prime minister finally decided last Wednesday to invoke the general "principle of precaution" and order the destruction of all the offending seed already planted. At the same time, Glavany said Advanta Seeds would be asked to compensate the affected farmers since the incident was "its responsibility." Without responding specifically to this proposition, the director of Advanta's French subsidiary, Jean Saulue, insisted that the seed had been imported "in strict accordance with the regulations." In effect, as an official at the French Agriculture Ministry pointed out, international regulations governing the trade in seeds tolerate a 1 percent impurity content, without specifying whether they might be of genetically modified origin or not.