Our contribution - as political scientists - to the ongoing debates over the regulation of biotechnology consists in examining "how" and "why" governments pursue particular courses of action or inaction (Heidenheimer et al. 1990) in the fields of ART and biomedicine. Hence, we aim primarily to provide a broader empirical knowledge base on how public policies are designed and chosen in two particular European countries, Belgium and France. Despite the considerable amount of political activity and the public attention surrounding these biotechnology issues, there is still a deficit in terms of political science research on this topic (Rothmayr and Varone 2002). This seems particularly evident if we compare what has been undertaken in the growing fields of bioethics, biolaw, and bioeconomics to the still missing – or at least underdeveloped – political science research in “biopolitics”.