Book Review: Tissue Economy: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism by Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell

"Tissue economies are about the way the biological capacities of the human body contribute to social, economic, and political systems of productivity and power" 

As bio-commercialism has grown, so has our need to put a price tag on an important new resource, our bodies. Catherine Waldby and Robert Michel address the struggles around identifying the value of and distributing biological donations and transformations in Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism. The authors carefully disentangle the complex history of property claims and ethical dilemmas in biotechnology.

In this spiritual follow up to my previous book review on Henrietta Lacks we get a closer look at the sticky politics around making tissue a commodity. This book highlights two camps in the tissue donation and therapy fields: those for an altruistic gift-economy, and those that support profitable, yet possibly more efficient market based economy. Should giving and receiving donations be part of the social contract of just being human, or should we pay an 'arm and a leg' (sorry, I had to) for an artificially extended life?

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Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

" If you believe the Bible is the literal truth, the immortality of Henrietta's cells make perfect sense. Of course they were growing and surviving decades after her death, of course they floated through the air, and of course they led to cures for diseases and been launched into space. Angels are like that. "

-- Rebecca Skloot

 Though one of this book's focal points is the HeLa cell line and its history, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks barely skims the surface of what was made possible by the research into Henrietta's cells. If I wanted to read about that, there are over 60,000 papers I could pick up detailing everything from making a polio vaccine to cell contamination. Instead, Rebecca Skloot  uses this book to write about the lasting effects of uninformed consent on a patient's family.

With practices that can only be compared to the Tuskegee syphilis study (an unethical experiment from 1932-1972 where doctors studied the natural progression of syphilis in an African American community even after an effective cure, penicillin, was made), doctors took a cancerous biopsy from Henrietta Lacks for purposes they did not reveal to her and made an immortal strain of cells that, through an unintentional chain of events, became a multimillion dollar industry. The business and research became so big that Henrietta's part in this field was cast aside. She became a product to be sold for $167 a vial. And though scientists learned innumerable things with her cells, Henrietta's family seemed to be the last to find out.

This book is amazing. It highlights unethical practices America has abolished, and some it hasn't. It even tackles health disparities between races, because Henrietta and her family are black, and their distrust for the "white doctors" moves the narrative forward. Even a divided world couldn't care less what race the cells were, because "under a microscope, cells don't have a color."

Thanks to this book, I think my next book review will be Tissue Economy: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism.