Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Science and Cultural Theory) [Paperback]

Catherine Waldby (Author), Robert Mitchell (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0822337703 | ISBN-13: 978-0822337706 | Publication Date: March 20, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Tissue Economies asks us to think about biological materials as inseparable from the networks of exchange, gift, and excess that condition their value to us. Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell show us a new body politic, one in which the organs, tissues, and fluids exist as much outside of and between bodies as they do within them.”—Eugene Thacker, author of The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture

“Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell demonstrate just how shaky are some of the structures underpinning the global politics of human tissue, such as the distinction between gift and commodity, when in late capitalism even tissue originally given altruistically is used as an open source of free tissue for commercial use on a worldwide scale. Yet they refuse the temptation of easy cynicism, asking what better models we can use instead to protect ourselves in the global tissue economy. This is an imaginative, up-to-date, and politically astute book.”—Donna Dickenson, author of Risk and Luck in Medical Ethics

“Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell offer a comprehensive analysis of key types of tissue transfer, tracing the networks within which human tissues circulate as waste, gift, and commodity. From their innovative exploration of the way the principle of informed consent has functioned to enable the commodification of tissue products, to their demonstration that conventional frameworks are inadequate for an understanding of contemporary practices of tissue trading, this book is an essential and eye-opening read.”—Susan Merrill Squier, author of Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine

About the Author

Catherine Waldby teaches medical sociology at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine and AIDS and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference.

Robert Mitchell is Assistant Professor of English at Duke University. He is a coeditor of Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information and Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (March 20, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822337703
• ISBN-13: 978-0822337706
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #560,152 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tissue Economies, January 4, 2007

By 

lumi (Northern hemisphere) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Science and Cultural Theory) (Paperback)

This book offers a highly interesting presentation and analysis of the ways tissues are handled, sold, used and conceptualized. For example blood, umbilical cord blood, cell lines and organs are discussed. Tissue Economies does not only describe the use of these tissues, but has also analytical discussions of biovalue, waste and information. Also the meaning of gift is discussed.
The economies of tissues are global questions that are intertwined in many different phenomena. Even nationality and selfhood are at stakes in these interactions.
I recommend this book to students of biosciences, women's studies and sociology. Reading Tissue Economies requires some background knowledge, but is not a difficult read.

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting discussion on the border of capital., November 7, 2010

By 

Benjamin J. Hunt (Oakland, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Science and Cultural Theory) (Paperback)

I find this book's strongest asset to be the historical discussions of blood banking systems and waste tissue lawsuits in the US and UK. The book outlines where the lines are drawn between flesh and cash: what tissues can be sold, which only gifted, and how else are they entangled? Donation, waste, banking, pools . . . toxic assets, etc.

If you love mixed metaphors, surgical theatres and social policy, this one is for you.