The Afterward to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks presents the argument made by Lori Andrews, director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She strongly supports individual patient rights. She “has called for people to get policymakers’ attention by becoming ‘conscientious objectors in the DNA draft’ and refusing to give tissue samples” :
Science is not the highest value in society,” Andrews says, pointing instead to things like autonomy and personal freedom. “Think about it,” she says. “I decide who gets my money after I die. It wouldn’t harm me if I died and you gave all my money to someone else. But there’s something psychologically beneficial to me as a living person to know I can give my money to whoever I want. No one can say, ‘She shouldn’t be allowed to do that with her money because that might not be most beneficial to society.’ But replace the word money in that sentence with tissue, and you’ve got precisely the logic many people use to argue against giving donors any control over their tissues.
David Korn, vice provost for research at Harvard University, has a different view. He argues that “‘consent diminishes the value of tissue'” :
To illustrate this, Korn points to the Spanish flu. pandemic. In the 1990s, scientists used stored tissue samples from a soldier who died in 1918 to re-create the virus’s genome and study why it was so deadly, with hopes of uncovering information about the current avian flu. In 1918, asking that soldier’s permisson to take tissues for this kind of future research would have been impossible, Korn says. “It was an inconceivable questions–no one even knew what DNA was!”For Korn, the consent issue is overshadowed by a public responsibility to science. . . . The only exception he would make is for people whose religious beliefs prohibit tissue donation. (320-321)
Do you think you should have full property rights over your own tissues and DNA? Refer to “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” in making your case for, against, or somewhere in the middle of this debate.
