Who Owns Your Body?

An Anonymous Coward writes: "I came across this article in Scientific American's latest issue. The author describes some of the most unethical business practices in the biotech industry. A doctor can take your body tissue sample without your consent and can patent unique chemicals/cells found in it." This is a book review of what looks like a pretty interesting and timely book about bioethics.

Comments

That's not what they mean by "unique."

[yardgnome]

OK, first off, that's a horribly worded reference to the article. It makes it sound as if doctors are taking the biopsies themselves with out permission. What's really going on is that doctors need to take some tissue anyway to do some test for a disease; and then they're done, rather than just throwing the rest of the tissue away they pass it on to other scientists that need to work with the same kind of tissue.

It's not as if they're patenting chemicals/cells that can only be found in *you*. Things like that would be next to useless, since the only person that could possibly use discoveries related to the "unique" thing would be yourself.

In this context, they're referring to chemicals/cells that haven't been discovered yet. These things are probably ubiquitous molecules (present in every other human being) that no one has looked for yet.

Therefore, scientists aren't trying to find extra-special bits of you to *steal* (as the article and first few posts seem to suggest). All they're trying to do is save a little money by skipping the costs of figuring out legal language for a consent form, etc. Whatever is biopsied from you is only used in the capacity of representing human cells, not your own.

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