munich

The government of Iceland has been accused of contravening an international convention by setting up a national bioethics committee whose members are selected exclusively by government departments.

The health minister announced last week that the new committee will immediately replace Iceland's existing seven-member bioethics committee. The latter was set up in 1997, and its members were selected by the ministry from nominations put forward by the academic and medical communities.

Members of the new five-member committee will be selected without external nominations. Its main duties will be to approve research protocols involving patients — in particular, patient data held in a planned national health database which will be run by a private company — and to give general advice to politicians on the ethical aspects of medical treatments.

Officials defend the new arrangement for selecting committee members by saying that the new members would be free to speak their minds. But critics say it could mean that only individuals who support official policies are appointed.

Pétur Hauksson, vice-president of Mannvernd, the Association of Icelanders for Ethics in Medicine and Science, argues that the move contravenes the 1964 Helsinki agreement on Medical Research on Humans, which states that all research ethics committees should be independent of the researchers, those who initiate or finance the research and the relevant authorities. In this case, the government is the relevant authority because it is in charge of licensing out the database.

Hauksson is particularly concerned that a committee chosen by government officials “may not be able to give truly objective views and opinions on new government plans to further regulate health-sector databases and biobanks, and to revise personal privacy laws”.

He also claims that the change was prompted by the government's desire to remove from the committee critics of the private company deCODE Genetics. The company is expected to be granted an exclusive 12-year licence by the government to create and market a national database combining genetic, health-care and genealogical information about Iceland's small population (see Nature 396, 395; 1998).

Ingibjörg Pálmadóttir, Iceland's Minister of Health, and Sigurdur Gudmundsson, the director-general of public health, reject such criticisms. Pálmadóttir says the judgement of the bioethics committee will not be biased just because its members are selected by the government, and that the new regulations will strengthen the committee's power.

Vilhjálmur Arnason, director of the University of Iceland's Institute of Ethics, said on public radio last weekend that the change in selection procedures would not strengthen the committee, but would “strengthen the control of the government over the committee”. He claimed that it was “almost too obvious” that the grounds for the change were the protection of the financial interests in the database project.

But Bogi Andersen, an Icelandic molecular geneticist working at the University of California, San Diego, and a vociferous critic of deCODE's plans for running the national database, says that parts of the new regulations are very positive, such as the likelihood that the bioethics commission would include a lay representative.