Tissue Economies

Author: Robert Mitchell
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388049
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book 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.

Tissue Economies

Author: Cathy Waldby
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822337706
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
DIVA cultural studies account of how the "bio-value" of blood, stem cells, organs, and cell lines moves back and forth between 'gift' and 'commodity'./div

South Asian Tissue Economies

Author: Jacob Copeman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317744179
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
Questions of the social implications of biotechnology and biological exchange (the extraction of human tissues such as blood, skin and organs for testing, storage and/or distribution for therapeutic or research purposes) have recently been brought strongly to the analytical fore across the social sciences. This book focuses on the variegated biopolitical milieus of this kind of exchange specifically in South Asia. It ranges widely – theoretically, thematically, and regionally – in examining South Asian variants of and engagements with diverse modes of biological exchange: caste, gender, and blood donation in Pakistan, DNA testing amongst a former Untouchable community in south India and amongst diasporic Indians in Houston, Texas, body (cadaveric) donation in India, the use of fake blood in Bangladeshi cinema, the mobilisation of blood, hearts, and ketones to protest the Indian government’s failure to provide redress or care to victims of the 1984 Bhopal industrial disaster, and blood-based political portraits and petitions in south India. In considering this complex of issues, this book extends the parameters of classic accounts of the role of substance transactions in the production of South Asian personhood into investigations of the biopolitics and economies of substance that shape people and communities in diverse parts of the subcontinent, describing findings that illuminate how local responses to the implementation of various kinds of tissue economy both reflect and also transform socio-cultural values in South Asia. This book was published as a special issue of Contemporary South Asia.

Body Bazaar

Author: Lori B. Andrews
Publisher: Crown
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
This disturbing and eye-opening book explores the growing trade in human DNA, blood, tissues, bones, embryos, and other commodities of the burgeoning new biotechnology market.

Life as Surplus

Author: Melinda E. Cooper
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295990317
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
Focusing on the period between the 1970s and the present, Life as Surplus is a pointed and important study of the relationship between politics, economics, science, and cultural values in the United States today. Melinda Cooper demonstrates that the history of biotechnology cannot be understood without taking into account the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism as a political force and an economic policy. From the development of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s to the second Bush administration's policies on stem cell research, Cooper connects the utopian polemic of free-market capitalism with growing internal contradictions of the commercialized life sciences. The biotech revolution relocated economic production at the genetic, microbial, and cellular level. Taking as her point of departure the assumption that life has been drawn into the circuits of value creation, Cooper underscores the relations between scientific, economic, political, and social practices. In penetrating analyses of Reagan-era science policy, the militarization of the life sciences, HIV politics, pharmaceutical imperialism, tissue engineering, stem cell science, and the pro-life movement, the author examines the speculative impulses that have animated the growth of the bioeconomy. At the very core of the new post-industrial economy is the transformation of biological life into surplus value. Life as Surplus offers a clear assessment of both the transformative, therapeutic dimensions of the contemporary life sciences and the violence, obligation, and debt servitude crystallizing around the emerging bioeconomy.

Stem Cells and the Future of Regenerative Medicine

Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309170427
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description
Recent scientific breakthroughs, celebrity patient advocates, and conflicting religious beliefs have come together to bring the state of stem cell researchâ€"specifically embryonic stem cell researchâ€"into the political crosshairs. President Bush's watershed policy statement allows federal funding for embryonic stem cell research but only on a limited number of stem cell lines. Millions of Americans could be affected by the continuing political debate among policymakers and the public. Stem Cells and the Future of Regenerative Medicine provides a deeper exploration of the biological, ethical, and funding questions prompted by the therapeutic potential of undifferentiated human cells. In terms accessible to lay readers, the book summarizes what we know about adult and embryonic stem cells and discusses how to go about the transition from mouse studies to research that has therapeutic implications for people. Perhaps most important, Stem Cells and the Future of Regenerative Medicine also provides an overview of the moral and ethical problems that arise from the use of embryonic stem cells. This timely book compares the impact of public and private research funding and discusses approaches to appropriate research oversight. Based on the insights of leading scientists, ethicists, and other authorities, the book offers authoritative recommendations regarding the use of existing stem cell lines versus new lines in research, the important role of the federal government in this field of research, and other fundamental issues.

Regenerating Bodies

Author: Julie Kent
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136596240
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
This exciting book examines how human tissues and cells are being exchanged, commodified and commercialized by new health technologies. Through a discussion of emergent global ‘tissue economies’ the author explores the social dynamics of innovation in the fields of tissue engineering and stem cell science. The book explores how regenerative medicine configures and conceptualizes bodies and argues that the development of regenerative medicine is a feminist issue. In Regenerating Bodies, Kent critically examines the transformative potential of regenerative medicine and whether it represents a paradigm shift from more traditional forms of biomedicine. The book shows that users of these technologies are gendered and women’s bodies are enrolled in the production of them in particular ways. So what is the value of a feminist bioethics for thinking about the ethical issues at stake? Drawing on extensive qualitative field research, Kent examines the issues around donation, procurement, banking and engineering of human tissues, and presents an analysis of the regulatory and policy debates surrounding these practices within Europe and the UK. The book considers the claims that regenerative medicine represents exciting possibilities for treating the diseases of ageing bodies, critically assessing what kind of futures are embodied in tissue and cell based therapies. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students within the social sciences, in health technology studies, bioethics, feminist studies, and gender and health studies.

Tissue Surgery

Author: Maria Z. Siemionow
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1846281288
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Book Description
A definitive summary of novel techniques, this volume details the most current and multidisciplinary approach to new technologies used in general plastic surgery, hand surgery, peripheral nerve surgery, microsurgery, breast surgery, esthetic surgery, and trauma surgery. It also gives an overview of the most important and clinically relevant plastic surgery research. The aim is to stimulate the reader to look at future advances and applications of research and their relevance to daily clinical practice in plastic surgery. Appropriate for different sub-specialties not only in plastic surgery (breast, face, esthetic, hand, microsurgery chapters) but also in orthopedics (hand, microsurgery, nerve chapters) and neurosurgery (peripheral nerve chapter), this book will also be of great interest to trainee surgeons.

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography

Author: Matthew Himley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429784082
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 494

Book Description
This Handbook provides an essential guide to the study of resources and their role in socio-environmental change. With original contributions from more than 60 authors with expertise in a wide range of resource types and world regions, it offers a toolkit of conceptual and methodological approaches for documenting, analyzing, and reimagining resources and the worlds with which they are entangled. The volume has an introduction and four thematic sections. The introductory chapter outlines key trajectories for thinking critically with and about resources. Chapters in Section I, "(Un)knowing resources," offer distinct epistemological entry points and approaches for studying resources. Chapters in Section II, "(Un)knowing resource systems," examine the components and logics of the capitalist systems through which resources are made, circulated, consumed, and disposed of, while chapters in Section III, "Doing critical resource geography: Methods, advocacy, and teaching," focus on the practices of critical resource scholarship, exploring the opportunities and challenges of carrying out engaged forms of research and pedagogy. Chapters in Section IV, "Resource-making/world-making," use case studies to illustrate how things are made into resources and how these processes of resource-making transform socio-environmental life. This vibrant and diverse critical resource scholarship provides an indispensable reference point for researchers, students, and practitioners interested in understanding how resources matter to the world and to the systems, conflicts, and debates that make and remake it.

The Oocyte Economy

Author: Catherine Waldby
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478005564
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
In recent years increasing numbers of women from wealthy countries have turned to egg donation, egg freezing, and in vitro fertilization to become pregnant, especially later in life. This trend has created new ways of using, exchanging, and understanding oocytes—the reproductive cells specific to women. In The Oocyte Economy Catherine Waldby draws on 130 interviews---with scientists, clinicians, and women who have either donated or frozen their oocytes or received those of another woman---to trace how the history of human oocytes' perceived value intersects with the biological and social life of women. Demonstrating how oocytes have come to be understood as discrete and scarce biomedical objects open to valuation, management, and exchange, Waldby examines the global market for oocytes and the power dynamics between recipients and the often younger and poorer donors. With this exploration of the oocyte economy and its contemporary biopolitical significance, Waldby rethinks the relationship between fertility, gendered experience, and biomedical innovation.