Who Owns Your Body Parts?

Everyone's making money in the market for body tissue -- except the donors.

Kerry Howley from the March 2007 issue

(Page 3 of 11)

 

Surgeons use AlloDerm for all manner of life-enhancing procedures, from reconstructive breast surgery to hernia repair, as well as some perhaps less urgent operations. AlloDerm injections are a leading method of lip enhancement, an increasingly popular procedure among women. And the miracle substance is not without cosmetic benefit for men. "Some surgeons promote its use and employ it regularly for penis enlargement," says Stephen Giunta, a Virginia surgeon specializing in phalloplasty, "even though the manufacturer advises them not to do so."

 

AlloDerm is but one of many products that rely on donated bodies for their manufacture. Another New Jersey company, Osteotech, processes donated bone into a putty surgeons use to patch small breaks. The publicly traded firm also sells demineralized bone as "dental dust," a product that accelerates healing after tooth extractions. DePuy Spine, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, crafts raw tissue into specialized bio-implants for spinal surgery. The list of life-giving new technologies is long and growing.

 

Where bodies aren't mined for raw material, they're treasured for research. The military buys cadavers to test explosive devices. Medical device companies buy them to test surgical equipment. Surgeons buy them to learn to use the same.

 

Tissue transplants range from the critical to the seemingly frivolous, but the industry's impact is clearly positive. The thriving market in tissue has enhanced the lives of millions of recipients, and it is a font of new products that will improve the lives of millions more. Tissue transplants can give sight to the blind and mobility to the bed-ridden. Before such operations were routine, limbs with cancerous bones would have to be amputated; now they can be replaced.

 

Law and custom both prohibit the sale of cadaveric tissue, a ban heartily supported by bioethicists like Arthur Caplan, the influential director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics. The prohibitionists warn of the degradation and commodification of human beings, but scientific progress has blurred the line between tissue and commodity. Doctors need a constant stream of remains to perform-and profit from-their work. The current compromise treats the body as property once it's in the hands of a corporation but as a "priceless" gift as it passes from a donor's family into the marketplace.

 

"We have a schizophrenic system," explains Lori Andrews, a professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law who specializes in the legal implications of biotechnologies. Tissues, she says, "are being treated as property by the researchers and doctors secretly, and patients don't even realize that they have monetary value."

 

Current law proscribes the compensation of donors, ostensibly for their protection. But it also allows virtually anyone else to buy and sell tissue. Publicly traded companies are pumping out treatments that use the remnants of the dead to cure the bodies of the living; the preservation of life requires the commodification of death. "Bodies are in this stream of commerce, and that's not ultimately a bad thing," says Michele Goodwin, director of the Health Law Institute at DePaul University and author of the 2006 book Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts. "But it's set up in such a way where only companies, brokers, and middlepersons receive compensation, and family members don't. It's an underhanded way of dealing with the public."