Tissue Economies

Mitchell Robert Mitchell, Waldby Catherine Waldby

Description

As new medical technologies are developed, more and more human tissues-such as skin, bones, heart valves, embryos, and stem cell lines-are stored and distributed for therapeutic and research purposes. The accelerating circulation of human tissue fragments raises profound social and ethical concerns related to who donates or sells bodily tissue, who receives it, and who profits-or does not-from the transaction. Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell survey the rapidly expanding economies of exchange in human tissue, explaining the complex questions raised and suggesting likely developments. Comparing contemporary tissue economies in the United Kingdom and United States, they explore and complicate the distinction that has dominated practice and policy for several decades: the distinction between tissue as a gift to be exchanged in a transaction separate from the commercial market and tissue as a commodity to be traded for profit.Waldby and Mitchell pull together a prodigious amount of research-involving policy reports and scientific papers, operating manuals, legal decisions, interviews, journalism, and Congressional testimony-to offer a series of case studies based on particular forms of tissue exchange. They examine the effect of threats of contamination-from HIV and other pathogens-on blood banks' understandings of the gift/commodity relationship; the growth of autologous economies, in which individuals bank their tissues for their own use; the creation of the United Kingdom's Stem Cell bank, which facilitates the donation of embryos for stem cell development; and the legal and financial repercussions of designating some tissues "hospital waste." They also consider the impact of different models of biotechnology patents on tissue economies and the relationship between experimental therapies to regenerate damaged or degenerated tissues and calls for a legal, for-profit market in organs. Ultimately, Waldby and Mitchell conclude that scientific technologies, the globalization of tissue exchange, and recent anthropological, sociological, and legal thinking have blurred any strict line separating donations from the incursion of market values into tissue economies.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Microeconomics
• Biotechnology

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 20 mars 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822388043
• Langue: English

Extrait

Tissue Economies

s c i e n c e a n d c u l t u r a l t h e o r y

A Series Edited by Barbara Herrnstein Smith

and E. Roy Weintraub

a j o h n h o p e f r a n k l i n c e n t e r b o o k

Tissue Economies

blood, organs, and cell lines

in late capitalism

Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell

duke university press Durham and London 2006

∫2006 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

on acidfree paper$

Designed by C. H. Westmoreland

Typeset in Scala by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication

Data appear on the last printed page

of this book.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii Introduction: Gifts, Commodities, and Human Tissues1

P A R T I Tissue Banks: Managing the Tissue Economy31

1 Blood Banks, Risk, and Autologous Donation: The Gift of Blood to Oneself35

2 Disentangling the Embryonic Gift: The UK Stem Cell Bank59

P A R T I I

Waste and Tissue Economies83

3 The Laws of Mo(o)re: Waste, Biovalue, and Information Ecologies88

4 Umbilical Cord Blood: Waste, Gift, Venture Capital110

P A R T I I I Biogifts of Capital131

5 Commodity-Communities and Corporate Commons135

6 Real-Time Demand: Information, Regeneration, and Organ Markets160

Conclusion: The Future of Tissue Economies181 Notes189 Bibliography207 Index227

Acknowledgments

Catherine Waldby would like to thank, first of all, her wonderful col- leagues at Brunel University, London. In particular she wishes to ac- knowledge the unfailing enthusiasm and humor of Alan Irwin, and the kindness and support of Ian Robinson. Numerous friends and colleagues made intellectual life in London rich and exciting. Thanks to John Stringer and Alan Waters for the civilized pleasures of Ealing; to Celia Lury, Mariam Fraser, Marsha Rosengarten, Mike Michaels, and many other colleagues at Goldsmith’s College for their incisive critiques and good company; to Nikolas Rose, Karen Throsby, Carlos Novas, and the rest of thebioscrew for their intellectual generosity and friendship; to Nina Wakeford and Nicola Green for their sociable collaborations around feminism and technology; to Celia Roberts, Adrian McKenzie, Alan Petersen, and Roz Porter for their hospitality and our ongoing conversations about medicine, the body, and technol- ogy. Catherine also thanks Andrew Webster for his support and assis- tance; Donna Dickenson for her generosity with her exhaustive knowl- edge of tissue economies in the United Kingdom; Susan Squier for her imaginative engagement and collaborative spirit; Melinda Cooper for her extraordinary scholarship and conversation; and Susan Kippax for innumerable forms of institutional, collegial, and personal sup- port. Lastly, Catherine thanks her wonderful friends Pam Hansford, Anne Brewster, and Paul Jones, and her family—David, Valerie, Gavan, Jenny, Madison, and Sebastian—for their love and support. Robert Mitchell wishes to thank Phillip Thurtle, who always pro- vides invaluable responses to all questions and queries; Shannon

viii

acknowledgments

Callies, whose third kidney was the starting point for one of these chapters; Donald Mitchell, who has always proved an eager and will- ing correspondent on the past and future of capitalism; and Matt Cohen, Lauren Dame, James Boyle, Inga Pollmann, Arti Rai, Patrick and Sharon Terry, and Priscilla Wald, whose comments significantly improved several of these chapters. He also thanks the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation Grant for funds which assisted in inter- views with the co-founders ofpxeInternational, and the students who participated in the course ‘‘Cultural Narratives of Genomics’’ at Duke University in the fall of 2004 (and an especial thanks to the teaching assistant for that course, Erin Gentry). We would both like to thank the organizers of, and participants in, conferences at which we presented early versions of this material, including the Society for Literature and Science conference in Den- mark, 2002, where this project began; the Society for Literature and Science conference in Pasadena, California, 2002; thebiosseminar series and thebiosconference ‘‘Vital Politics’’ at the London School of Economics in 2003; the Literature and Genetics Colloquium at Vanderbilt and Duke Universities in 2003 and 2004; and the con- ference of the Society for Social Studies of Science/EASST in Paris, 2004. Finally, we thank the two anonymous readers of our manu- script, whose comments and suggestions greatly enriched the final version of this book, and Raphael Allen, Reynolds Smith, Courtney Berger, and all the others at Duke University Press who have made this book possible.

Introduction

gifts, commodities,

and human tissues

Blood, Community, and September 11 Within hours of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the American Association of Blood Banks, and the American Red Cross issued calls for people to donate blood. Supplies were low throughout the state of New York. Four days before the attacks, state hospitals and health professionals had convened a meet- ing to discuss ways to improve the blood supply (Butler 2001). In the chaos following the attacks, health authorities could not estimate how many people were injured, or what quantities of transfusion blood they might need. Immediately thousands of people came forward to give blood. They waited in line for hours. The New York Blood Center, which supplies most of the city’s hospitals, collected more than five thousand units of blood and fielded twelve thousand phone calls in the first twelve hours. In Washington, after the terrorist attack on the Pentagon, blood was collected at hospitals, makeshift centers, and a building next to the White House (Schmidt 2002). When the collec- tion centers closed, many people queued through the night. At 6:30 the next morning there were already long lines outside blood banks (Guardian, 12 September 2001). Hospitals, already dealing with the wounded and dying, had di≈culty finding enough trained sta√ to test donated blood, or storage capacity to accept the volume o√ered.