The UN is carving itself a role in international biotechnology regulation, but to what end?
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Convention on Biological Diversity, United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), 1992. There may be advantages to such a sweeping definition: In theory, it provides latitude for circumscribing categories of organisms to be used in a field trial that DESERVE a government safety review. That is, case by case review could be limited to those categories that are legitimately judged to be of possible significant risk. This kind of risk-based approach (p.4,5) would be more defensible scientifically than the process- or technique-based approaches of the European Union's directive for field research (p.6), the UNIDO code of conduct (p.1), and the USDA and EPA.7
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Miller, H. Biotechnology and the UN: New challenges, new failures. Nat Biotechnol 14, 831–834 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0796-831
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0796-831