This mouse should roar: To make animals suffer is one thing. To profit from it is altogether another, says Tom Wilkie

In the beginning, we are told, God created heaven and earth and every living creature that moveth in the waters and that creepeth upon the earth. But the Old Testament got it wrong, according to the European Patent Office: living animals can now be classed as 'inventions' devised by human beings.

Last week, a coalition of animal welfare groups across Europe filed detailed legal arguments with the EPO, opposing the patent it granted on the 'Oncomouse', a hapless creature genetically programmed by scientists at Harvard University to die from cancer. These groups say that to grant such a patent would be immoral. They are right.

To make animals suffer is one thing; to make money out of making animals suffer is altogether another one. Article 53a of the European Patent Convention expressly prevents a patent being granted if exploitation of the 'invention' is contrary to public morality. The EPO should act on article 53a and rescind the Oncomouse patent, which it issued provisionally last May.

The British opposition groups' position, presented to a press conference last week, is refreshingly direct: patenting animals is wrong.

There was no citing of commercial interests, no cold calculation of how the benefit to humanity outweighs the animals' suffering. If the thing was immoral, nothing further needed to be said.

But there is a great deal still to be said. Detailed technical arguments suggest that the EPO over-valued the animal's usefulness to research and thus, even in its own terms, has made a mistake in assessing the morality of patenting the Oncomouse.

This, however, is not a narrow technical question, and it should not be decided by the technocrats of the EPO. One of the strange aspects of the issue is that it has aroused so little public debate. The Oncomouse patent is the first to be granted by the EPO on a living animal. If it is upheld, it will set a precedent for some 70 other applications believed to be pending.

If the scientific community is wise, it will come out against the patent. A growing number of researchers who work on live animals believe that the only ethical justification of animals' suffering in laboratories is their present or future benefit to humanity. This view accords moral rights to the animals, but places lesser value upon those rights than upon the rights of human beings.

Such a position would not be accepted by organisations such as the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection

(a leading opponent of the EPO's position), but for some it is tenable.

There is, however, a world of difference between a scientist conducting research involving the use of live animals and the president and fellows of Harvard University deriving crass commercial gain by levying fees on every mouse, rabbit or chimpanzee unfortunate enough to have a cancer-causing gene stitched into its DNA. Public opposition to such practices will grow if more such patents are granted without comment by the scientific community.

Dr David Owen, director of industrial collaboration and licensing for the Medical Research Council, believes that to link morality with patenting, as the convention does, 'may end up with technically irrational patenting decisions and bad ethical decisions'. Emphasising that he was not talking on the council's behalf, he said he believed that the two issues ought to be separated and that a different mechanism ought to be used to regulate the morality of exploiting a patented invention.

Among the patents believed to be pending at the EPO are such aberrations as a chicken into whose genetic structure researchers have stitched the gene that produces growth hormone in cattle. This chicken will grow faster and produce leaner meat, and the males will produce sperm earlier - all commercially desirable characteristics.

Is this really the path that we, at the end of the 20th century, wish to follow? To regard living animals as 'inventions' of human ingenuity, to be created and exploited without moral regard to their status as sentient creatures? As Joyce D'Silva, director of Compassion in World Farming, has said, this is a truly medieval attitude, redolent of St Thomas Aquinas's dictum that 'by Divine Providence animals are intended for man's use'.

But would Aquinas have felt that Divine Providence's purposes embraced Harvard University's monetary gain? The opponents of the patent have put forward elegant arguments that the commercial exploitation of animals whose genes have been altered in the laboratory is contrary to the teachings of the main religious traditions. It would be interesting to learn which theologians the EPO consulted before it ruled on the Oncomouse patent.

There is, of course, one Cabinet minister whose devout religious beliefs have received considerable publicity in recent months. Fortuitously, if further patents on animals are granted, he will have direct responsibility for dealing with genetically engineered farm animals.

Perhaps John Selwyn Gummer ought to divert his attention from the internal squabbles of the Church of England over women priests and attend to issues of true moral and religious import. Come to that, one might ask why the Church of England's voice is absent from discussion on the patenting of animals. But it should hurry: it has only until 12 February to file if it does

object.