Paul Goble
Staunton, Mar. 26 – At the end of February, less than two months after the government introduced it, Vladimir Putin singed a law “on the state regulation in the field of genetic engineering activities,” a measure that Russian experts tell researchers from Radio Liberty’s The System project has several dangerous consequences.
By making all genetic data to be deposited in a national genetics center classified, they say, it will allow the government to decide whether genetic information could be released in the cases of Russian soldiers charged with sex crimes, a restriction making their convictions far more difficult (svoboda.org/a/suverennaya-genetika-rossiyskaya-biologicheskaya-nauka-ambitsiozno-otmezhevalasj-ot-mirovoy/33716011.html).
The experts also say that classifying and restricting access to genetic information in the way the new law does will limit the ability of Russian scholars to develop useful medicines and also their ability to share information about genetic research in the Russian Federation with foreigners, thus reducing the chance for cures of certain diseases.
And they say that the use of classification in this area will feed the mistaken notion of Putin and many around him that the West is developing biological weapons that will be used against ethnic Russians. That is impossible as Russians lack a common genome, experts point out, and so the notion that Russia should counter something that isn’t being done is absurd.
None of the experts doubts that Russia and other countries need to develop laws to ensure the safe handling of genetic data, but they are unanimous that the measure Putin rushed through the parliament and now has signed is not the way to go about it. Far more research and discussion is needed, or the results of such a law are likely to be dire indeed.
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