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Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age
Insight on the News, May 28, 2001 by Elizabeth M. Whelan
Biomedical Prostitution?
As technology finds new uses for tissue, blood, bone and DNA, ethicists struggle with the commercialization of the human body, the source for an increasing range of clinical products.
The chemicals of a human body were estimated to be worth 89 cents. Now, according to the authors of a provocative (and in some ways, shocking) new book, body parts, both in people and corpses, may be worth millions.
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The commercialization of the human body, in pursuit of new pharmaceuticals, organ transplants and genetic research on individuals alive and dead, raises mind-boggling ethical and moral issues, write Lori Andrews and Dorothy Nelkin in Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age (Crown, $24, 245 pp). The trend has ethicists confronting the most basic questions: Do individuals have "rights" to their blood and tissues? Should body parts be bought and sold? Whose body is it, anyway?
The authors have produced a highly readable, extraordinarily researched book (there are nearly 60 pages of references), not surprising given their qualifications: Andrews is director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology and a distinguished professor of law at Chicago's Kent College of Law; Nelkin holds a university professorship at New York University and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
In recent years, biotechnology has transformed human body tissues into marketable research materials and clinical products. Institutions that have access to such tissues have a ready commercial resource. In 1995, for example, the National Institute of Mental Health obtained interviews, clinical data and, most important, DNA samples from hundreds of families who had suffered with Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia or manic depression. The government agency sold access to these resources to Merck, Pfizer and other pharmaceutical houses for their use in developing diagnostics and therapeutic products for mental disorders.
"Whole businesses are developing around the body business," the authors write. "Companies have sprung up, for example, to make commercial products out of corpses' bones. Some grind up the bones into powder that, when sprinkled on broken live bones, will help them mend."
From the beginning, Andrews and Nelkin make it clear that body parts from the living and the dead are gold mines for pharmaceutical development. "Pieces of people are used in a variety of ways," the authors tell us, noting that infant foreskin removed in circumcisions is used to create new tissue for artificial skin; thigh muscle and umbilical cords are purchased from hospitals and used in the development of blood products. These parts might be considered "leftovers" ... disposables. But with the advent of genetic decoding and biotechnology, body-part issues become much more complex.
The authors could have (and probably should have) limited the focus of their book to biomedical research. But the book detours into macabre, but not necessarily related, areas of ethics and commerce. Who owns the rights to a corpse? What ethical considerations need to be evaluated, for example, when a researcher seeks to do genetic testing on long-deceased individuals such as George Washington?
Further, what are the ethical considerations associated with the truly numbing and morbid practice of using human body parts as a means of "expression"? For example, we learn that an artist in Germany routinely purchases corpses, plasticizes the body parts and reassembles them, leaving flaps of skin open to display the anatomy. Does this practice debase the sanctity of the human body? Another artist uses human blood to paint on canvas. And yet another one acquired two human fetuses and molded them onto a ceramic skull as "earrings." Most readers will be stunned and revolted to learn that you can go to a Website called Skulls Unlimited and find advertisements for human skulls ranging in price from $279 to $599, depending on the number of teeth and the condition.
Body Bazaar is a book that, despite its occasional diversions, introduces us to the future of medical research and the problems of privacy and social control that arise with the demand for human body parts in medical commerce. As you read it, it is unavoidable once or twice to ask yourself "is this real -- or is this science fiction?"
Elizabeth M. Whelan is president of the American Council on Science and Health.
COPYRIGHT 2001 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
