Sumário:Biotechnologies, intellectual, property and healthcare: From fiction to reality : the impact of biotechnology in the health sector -- Biotechnologies and the rational of intellectual property -- Sensitive ethical issues in biotechnology patents -- The rights to health and the role of patents : fixing market failures -- Patents of biotechnological inventions -- EU directive on biotechnological inventions: The legal protection of biotechnological inventios as a European industrial policy tool. Biotechnological inventions are to be protected under national patent law. Patent protection for biotechnological inventions either as products or a processes. Novelty, inventive step, and industrial application as general requirements of patentabilty of biotchnological inventions. Patentability of biological material isolated from its natural enviromment or produced by means of technical process. Patentability of processes for treatment of the human or animal body by surgery or therapy and diagnostic methods practiced in the human or animal body as a matter of national law. Elements excluded from patentability as mere discoveries per se (1) : plant and animal varieties and essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals. Elements excluded from patentability as mere discoveries per se (2) : the human body or one of its elements. Disclosure of the DNA function. Free and informed consent of the person from whose body the material is taken -- Absolute exclusion of patentability of inventions the comercial exploitation of wich is contrary to ordre public or morality (2) : processes to produce chimeras from germ cells or topipotent cells of humans and animals (a), process for modifying the germ line genetic identity of human being (b) and process for cloning humnan beings (c).