Risks and Rights in Xenotransplantation

The attempt to provide a regulatory environment for xenotransplantation is giving rise to different scientific-normative models, aimed at balancing individual rights and public interests in dealing with the uncertainties deriving from the potential of xenogenetic infections. These models express different ways of constructing risks and of thinking about unknown, unprecedented and potentially irreversible events, reducing them to identifiable and quantifiable risks, identifiable but non-quantifiable uncertainties, or undetermined uncertainties. In all these constructs, scientific models and normative models interact with each others by prioritizing the different values involved –both from a scientific and from a legal point of view-, and so generating different orders of knowledge and rights-or-prescriptions. Particular assumptions about scientific issues are compatible and can be combined with some legal prescriptions or legal guarantees; particular assumptions about the legal context or rights are coherent with the adoption of determined visions of science. From time to time, a privileged vision of science will frame the legal tools involved in the regulatory activity; or fundamental legal guarantees will shape the vision of scientific issues accordingly. This contribution explores three different models of co-production between science and the law in the field of xenotransplantation, namely the US-PHS Guidelines (2001), the Canadian and the Australian regulatory approach (2002), and the Council of Europe Guidelines (2003).