Legal status of human biomaterial

Abstract

The article is devoted to one of the urgent and topical problems of medical law, the problem of determining the legal status of human biological material. The changes taking place today in medicine and genetics open up a number of new opportunities for the study of man, his body and its use. Man has long been seen by science not so much as a "spiritual" value, but as a value as an "object of study" and an "object of experiment". No one denies the material essence of human organs, tissues, their ability to be the subject of a number of civil law transactions (purchase, sale, mines, storage, transportation, etc.). All this requires the legislator to look at human biological material in a new way. The law must respond to all these changes that are taking place in society, in the form of regulation of these benefits, the absence of which we see today. Public relations are developing much faster than the corresponding changes in legislation. The law can help the development of these relations, properly regulating them, and can slow down this process, which is currently happening in Ukrainian law. However, the law cannot stop the process of using human biomaterial, which has long begun. Thus, the purpose of the article is to consider the legal status of human biological material, to determine its place among the existing objects of civil rights. It is proved that the current level of development of medicine, genetics requires a new approach to the study of human biological material, its legal status and place in the system of modern civil law, which determines the relevance of the chosen research topic. Unfortunately, the legislation of Ukraine and most foreign countries does not recognize biomaterial separated from humans as an object of civil rights. However, the author concluded that the subject of a number of transactions, separated from human biomaterial, is no longer an "integral" part of the body, which only confirms the need to consider it as an independent object of civil law, which by its characteristics (material (physical) separation and the ability to act as a commodity in civil circulation) "tends" to the category of things, which is the novelty of this work.