Tissue Economies

"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 "[A] rich and balanced account of the ethical and social implications of tissue transfer and the networks in which such transfers occur. Tissue Economies is a powerful example of the contribution that social science and humanities perspectives can bring to contemporary medical practices. . . . This book will be of interest to the health policy and medical professions for its clarity, comparative case-study approach, and ability to demonstrate, case by case, the inadequacy of the gift/commodity dichotomy." -- Laura Mamo * JAMA * "[T]he book offers a wealth of knowledge in relation to biotechnology's role in contemporary human tissue economies. More than this, by revealing the ways in which advances in biotechnology and biocommunication unfold in and through transforming social institutions (such as public bureaucracies and commercial enterprise, child-bearing, aging, health and welfare systems) Tissue Economies discloses how we are all implicated in the dense webs of meanings, judgments, hopes, and fears that contemporary tissue economies trade on." -- Ruth McManus * American Journal of Sociology *

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.

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Gifts, Commodities, and Human Tissues 1 Part I. Tissue Banks: Managing the Tissue Economy 31 1. Blood Banks, Risk, and Autologous Donation: The Gift of Blood to Oneself 35 2. Disentangling the Embryonic Gift: The UK Stem Cell Bank 59 Part II. Waste and Tissue Economies 83 3. The Laws of Mo(o)re: Waste, Biovalue, and Information Ecologies 88 4. Umbilical Cord Blood: Waste, Gift, Venture Capital 110 Part III. Biogifts of Capital 131 5. Commodity-Communities and Corporate Commons 135 6. Real-Time Demand: Information, Regeneration, and Organ Markets 160 Conclusion: The Future of Tissue Economies 181 Notes 189 Bibliography 207 Index 227