Tissue Economies

Book: Tissue Economies. by Catherline Waldby and Robert Mitchell (Duke University Press, 2006)

= "explores the ways in which blood, organs, cell lines and other parts of human bodies circulate among patients, physicians, researchers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and cosmetics makers."

Description

David Bollier:

this is "a fascinating book that explores how markets and commons are intertwined in strange, unsuspected ways.

The book is a revelation about a little-known sub-economy that is both highly intimate and crudely impersonal. It shows how human identity and social ethics are entangled with certain body parts but not others, and how meanings shift and evolve as human tissues circulate in different contexts.

For example, people ascribe ethical significance to donations of hearts, organs and embryos to transplant recipients and scientists; the organs are seen as highly personal symbols of personhood. But no such meaning is attached to fingernail clippings, hair and other human waste. Acordingly, the latter can be immediately treated as commodities by those industries that recycle and transform “waste” tissues into saleable products. Placentas can ge sold to cometic companies and genetic researchers can abstract valuable genetic knowledge from hair and tumor tissue without anyone raising a fuss.

But there is an ethical norm that human organs should not just be bought and sold. That’s because we attach an ontological significance to organs as emblems of our human identity. It degrades them to treat them as mere commodities. Such attitudes inform our notions of property rights and ownership of human tissue.

Although Tissue Economies is mostly about the gifting of and trafficking in human tissue, it is filled with penetrating insights into the ways that markets and gift economies play off of each other. It explores, for example, how the same object can vacillate between gift and commodity, much as light is now known to be both particle and wave. I am already pondering how these insights might apply to online gift economies (think open source software or Flickr photos), whose resources may have double identities as gift and commodity. What is the process for mediating a transition from one to the other? What social and moral consequences follow?" (http://onthecommons.org/node/1182)

More Information

See the related book: The Gift Relationship