Who owns you? by LifeEthics.org

And how much information is owed to you if someone can make a buck off your body parts?

The New York Times recently discovered informed consent. Rebecca Sklook has written a fantastically informative article, "Taking the Least of You," (free subscription required) for the magazine, published April 16, 2006.

The article explains more about patents on human tissues, which was touched on last week, in my post on the patents on human (and all primate) embryonic stem cells.

It is more than worth your time to read the article, for the history of a few key patients and legal rulings. Hopefully, Ms. Skloop will also stimulate more discussion in public venues of the commercialization of much of scientific research and about the duties of universities, our doctors and even a thought or two about judges who rule that patients' tissues are abandoned when they are left with our doctors. There is much to consider in the very brief discussion about the work-around in the selling and buying of human tissues. (An interesting observation: Ms. Skloot does not mention the HeLa cells, the history of which is the subject of her new book.)

"The truth," he [Catalona, one of the doctors who lost control of samples to the university he worked for] told me, "is that the interests of patients and science often conflict with the interests of the university. And sometimes universities protect their interests to the detriment of the patients."

What it all comes down to is that you do not own the parts of you, if there is a utilitarian purpose that unscrupulous doctors, universities, and lawyers and judges can perceive or conceive of for those parts. (Money talks and no one wants to die - I guess these age old motives still rule.)
I doubt than many of us consider what happens to our blood at the laboratory or to that skin tag the doc cut off and sent to the lab.

Today most Americans have their tissue on file somewhere. In 1999 the RAND Corporation published a report (the first and, so far, the last of its kind) with what it called a "conservative estimate" that more than 307 million tissue samples from more than 178 million people were stored in the United States. This number, the report said, was increasing by more than 20 million samples each year. These samples come from routine medical tests, operations, clinical trials and research donations. They sit in lab freezers, on shelves or in industrial vats of liquid nitrogen. They're stored at military facilities, the F.B.I. and the National Institutes of Health. They're in biotech companies and most hospitals. Biobanks store everything from appendixes, ovaries and skin to sphincters, testicles and fat. Not to mention blood samples taken from most children born in the United States since the late 60's, when states started mandating screening newborns for genetic diseases.

and

Editors' Note

An article on Page 38 of The Times Magazine today about human tissue includes an outdated reference to a lawsuit between Washington University and Dr. William J. Catalona over ownership of samples that he collected while employed there. On Friday, after the magazine had gone to press, the presiding judge ruled that the university “owns all biological materials, including but not limited to blood, tissue and DNA samples” that it stores.