W
hen it comes to money, the question isn’t whether human tissues and tissue research will be
commercialized. They are and will continue to be; without commercialization, companies
wouldn’t make the drugs and diagnostic tests so many of us depend on. The question is how
to deal with this commercialization—whether scientists should be required to tell people their
tissues may be used for profit, and where the people who donate those raw materials fit into
that marketplace.
It’s illegal to sell human organs and tissues for transplants or medical treatments, but it’s
perfectly legal to give them away while charging fees for collecting and processing them. In-
dustry-specific figures don’t exist, but estimates say one human body can bring in anywhere
from $10,000 to nearly $150,000. But it’s extremely rare for individual cells from one person to
be worth millions like John Moore’s. In fact, just as one mouse or one fruit fly isn’t terribly use-
ful for research, most individual cell lines and tissue samples aren’t worth anything on their
own. Their value for science comes from being part of a larger collection.
Today, tissue-supply companies range from small private businesses to huge corpora-
tions, like Ardais, which pays the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Duke University
Medical Center, and many others an undisclosed amount of money for exclusive access to
tissues collected from their patients.
“You can’t ignore this issue of who gets the money and what the money is used for,” says
Clayton. “I’m not sure what to do about it, but I’m pretty sure it’s weird to say everybody gets
money except the people providing the raw material.”
Various policy analysts, scientists, philosophers, and ethicists have suggested ways to
compensate tissue donors: creating a Social Securitylike system in which each donation en-
titles a person to increasing levels of compensation; giving donors tax write-offs; developing a
royalty system like the one used for compensating musicians when their songs are played on
the radio; requiring that a percentage of profits from tissue research go to scientific or medical
charities, or that all of it be funneled back into research.
Experts on both sides of the debate worry that compensating patients would lead to profit-
seekers inhibiting science by insisting on unrealistic financial agreements or demanding
money for tissues used in noncommercial or nonprofit research. But in the majority of cases,
tissue donors haven’t gone after profits at all. They, like most tissue-rights activists, are less
concerned about personal profits than about making sure the knowledge scientists gain by
studying tissues is available to the public, and to other researchers. In fact, several patient
groups have created their own tissue banks so they can control the use of their tissues and
the patenting of discoveries related to them, and one woman became a patent holder on the