Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age [Hardcover]

According to Lori Andrews and Dorothy Nelkin, in their troubling book _Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age_ (Crown Publications), that's happening often. It happened to John Moore, who about fifteen years ago was being treated by a specialist for hairy-cell leukemia. As you can imagine, such treatment required a lot of tests on Mr. Moore's body, but it seemed to Moore that there were too many going on, and that the doctor was secretive, and insistent that the blood, and then bone marrow and skin and semen, had to be obtained at his own lab. Moore investigated, and found that he had become patent number 4,438,032. The doctor had found that there were certain unique chemicals in Moore's blood, and the pharmaceutical company Sandoz had reportedly paid $15 million for the right to develop a cell line taken from Moore. The doctor seems to have said that he had found a "gold mine" in Moore, and Moore indeed felt he had been "harvested." So, of course, Moore sued for property theft. In 1990, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of the doctor, saying in effect that Moore didn't own his body parts, but the ones who discovered and patented them did.

Author Andrews is a legal scholar and bioethicist at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Nelkin is a New York University professor of law. They offer many other troubling examples of what we would intuitively regard as people's rights to their own body chemistry being smashed for the profits of gene-hunters and corporations.

Issues of genes are not the only problems covered in this worrisome book, which is an excellent introduction into a world we are just now making for ourselves. It also considers such things as the ownership of bodies which are prepared for artistic display; the Korean Ear Mound in Kyoto, Japan, a collection of body trophies from the Japanese-Korean War four hundred years ago; and the web sales of a firm called Skulls Unlimited. The genetic issues, because of their novelty, are certainly the most enigmatic, and the authors quite rightly raise questions about non-medical issues such as DNA typing of criminals, military people, or minorities to go into a computer whose usage may be unlimited. It is perhaps regrettable that the final chapter of the book, where one would expect intelligent recommendations for solutions, is only seven pages long, and contains more questions than answers. That is, I suppose, only because the book is one of the first calls to look at a new and serious ethical, scientific, and corporate problem. Perhaps we will have answers in the future, but it is a strange territory we are traveling through, and it is clear that we need somehow to change the road we are on.