My friend Kerry Howley has a fantastic piece on the bizarre state of the law regarding ownership of human body parts. Self-annointed “bioethicists” claim that we can’t give people the right to control what happens to their own body parts, because that could lead to a world in which body parts “become nothing more than chattel going to the highest bidder.”
And that would be bad because… well, it’s not clear why. Certainly, the research community hasn’t been shy about using their control over patients’ tissues to enrich themselves:
In the end, disputes of this kind always come back to John Moore’s million dollar spleen. Twenty years ago, UCLA School of Medicine Dr. David Golde told Moore his leukemia-ravaged spleen would have to go, and Moore agreed to have surgeons remove the organ. For years afterward, Moore would fly from his home in Seattle to UCLA, where Golde would check on his progress and take samples of sperm, blood, and bone marrow aspirate.
Unbeknownst to Moore, his supposedly trashed spleen was teeming with biomedical treasure. Golde derived a commercial cell line from the disembodied organ, and proceeded to patent it. Eventually, Moore became suspicious at the steady stream of vague release forms he was being asked to sign. He investigated, caught Golde, and sued. In 1990, a California court ruled that Moore had no proprietary right to the blood and tissue taken from his body. By that time, Golde had sold the patent for $2 million.
So apparently, it’s ethical to make large profits from human body parts, but only if the patient who provided the body parts doesn’t get a penny of it. Sounds ethical to me.
Kerry’s article is worth reading in full.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.