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

“[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, Journal of the American Medical Association

“Tissue Economies raises many important questions about the exchange of human bodily matter; it may be an inspiration to do the research necessary to better assess the circulation of human tissues in the world today.”—Hannah Landecker, Journal of the History of Medicine

“[A] revelation about a little-known sub-economy that is both highly intimate and crudely impersonal.”—David Bollier, On The Commons

“Tissue Economies is a valuable resource for understanding new relationships that are socializing tissue exchange in the ‘germ’ of contemporary capitalism.”—Kathryn Russell, Science and Society

“[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

“Tissue Economies by Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell is a valuable contribution to understanding the landscape of today’s rapidly developing biotechnology industry. . . . Waldby and Mitchell have succeeded in educating the reader in the complex landscape that is the tissue world.”—Steve Chasin, Hospital Topics

“[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, Journal of the American Medical Association

“Tissue Economies raises many important questions about the exchange of human bodily matter; it may be an inspiration to do the research necessary to better assess the circulation of human tissues in the world today.”—Hannah Landecker, Journal of the History of Medicine

“[A] revelation about a little-known sub-economy that is both highly intimate and crudely impersonal.”—David Bollier, On The Commons

“Tissue Economies is a valuable resource for understanding new relationships that are socializing tissue exchange in the ‘germ’ of contemporary capitalism.”—Kathryn Russell, Science and Society

“[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

“Tissue Economies by Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell is a valuable contribution to understanding the landscape of today’s rapidly developing biotechnology industry. . . . Waldby and Mitchell have succeeded in educating the reader in the complex landscape that is the tissue world.”—Steve Chasin, Hospital Topics

“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

“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

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