International liability and redress for genetically modified organisms and challenge for China's biosafety regulation

The UN Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (Biosafety Protocol) is an international instrument addressing the potential environment and health issues of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). Its article 27 on Liability and Redress, which finally has been explored as a new treaty "Nagoya-Kuala Lumpur Supplementary Protocol" (Supplementary Protocol) was recently adopted in October 2010. The new Protocol chose an administrative approach instead of an international civil liability regime, and left the implementation to the discretion of competent national authorities of the parties as rather a "national approach". As a party to the Biosafety Protocol, China might take the Supplementary Protocol into account for its own biosafety regime. The interplay between the Biosafety Protocol (and the Supplementary Protocol) with China's national biosafety regime will be briefly examined in this paper. It argues that a comprehensive biosafety law will be needed to oversee the import and export of GMOs, as well as efficiently manage cultivation of GM crops within China. The paper concludes that the inclusion of a liability clause into the biosafety law seems necessary for China's obligation to the Biosafety protocol to deal with the uncertainties of GMOs, thereby ensuring the sustainable development of biotechnology

Evolution of black-hole intermediate-mass X-ray binaries: the influence of a circumbinary disc

Justham, Rappaport & Podsiadlowski (2006) recently suggested that black-hole low-mass X-ray binaries (BHLMXBs) with short orbital periods may have evolved from black-hole intermediate-mass X-ray binaries (BHIMXBs). In their model the secondaries in BHIMXBs are assumed to possess anomalously high magnetic fields, so that magnetic braking can lead to substantial loss of angular momentum. In this paper we propose an alternative mechanism for orbital angular momentum loss in BHIMXBs. We assume that a small fraction $\delta$ of the transferred mass from the donor star form a circumbinary disc surrounding the binary system. The tidal torques exerted by the disc can effectively drain orbital angular momentum from the binary. We have numerically calculated the evolutionary sequences of BHIMXBs, to examine the influence of the circumbinary disc on the binary evolution. Our results indicate when \delta\la 0.01-0.1 (depending on the initial orbital periods), the circumbinary disc can cause secular orbital shrinking, leading to the formation of compact BHLMXBs, otherwise the orbits always expand during the evolution. This scenario also suggests the possible existence of luminous, persistent BHLMXBs, but it suffers the same problem as in Justham, Rappaport & Podsiadlowski (2006) that, the predicted effective temperatures of the donor stars are significantly higher than those of the observed donor stars in BHLMXBs.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA