Tissue Economies

"Waldby and Mitchell, like Naomi Klein, present a wide-ranging argument, which in their case applies to a number of areas in biotechnology. They produce an account of the way that tissue taken from a body can become a commodity, and look at the problems associated with this process. One example they focus on is private umbilical cord banking, where individuals pay for their child’s blood to be taken from the umbilical cord at birth and banked for a period of about 20 years. The theory is that you can provide some sort of personal spare-parts kit if stem cell research ever advances to the point where we can convert blood cells into tissues or organs. However, there have been criticisms of this practice on several bases. One is that there is something like only a one in 20,000 chance that the child is going to need it. Secondly, if your child did need it, that it would actually possibly be bad for the child to receive his or her own blood rather than blood from a public bank, for example if he or she had a genetically linked illness. Finally, there is another set of findings about the risk the child is in fact put at during childbirth when the blood is removed – umbilical cord blood is not waste blood, but is needed by the infant. The point is that, although there are documented medical reasons not to carry out this procedure, people do so. This is in a large part, Waldby and Mitchell argue, due to the economic influences."