10 R.M. Shaw
marginal forms of life from the body’s biological processes. Biovalue is
produced by biological materials and bodily labour from patients, who,
with or without their consent, provide ‘left over’, ‘reserve’ and ‘waste’
tissue (from foetal, cadaverous or embryonic sources) or participate
in clinical trials that transform and redeploy their biological materials
into patentable products to ‘enhance the health and vitality of the liv-
ing’ (Rose 2008 : 42; Rose and Novas 2005 : 455). The creation of bio-
value from reproductive tissue and other bodily materials is inextricably
linked to the development of the life sciences and the production of
bio-knowledge in post-Fordist neoliberal economies.
In their more recent work, Waldby and Cooper ( 2008 , 2010 ) and
Cooper and Waldby ( 2014 ) discuss biovalue and the creation of bio-
knowledge in terms of regenerative and clinical labour. Like Kean Birch
( 2012 ), they argue that value creation in the new bioeconomy depends
on the extraction of biological materials (e.g. tissue, genes, stem cells),
various forms of bodily and reproductive labour (e.g. clinical trial par-
ticipation, preparation for oöcyte donation), as well as immaterial
labour (e.g. clinical skill, experience and bio-knowledge). The social-
psychological motivations of individuals to donate or provide stem cells,
oöcytes, embryos, umbilical cord blood or even breastmilk for free and
unremunerated therefore end up making money for companies, organ-
isations and institutions with a vested interest in their transformation
and circulation. From this perspective, the characterisation of tissue
donation in simple terms as a gift or act of corporeal generosity over-
looks the way that mobile body tissues and fragments enter commodity
chains in complex global socio-economic systems.
Scholarship focusing on the creation of economic wealth from
the production of biovalue draws attention to the opacity of the
gift/commodity framework for understanding the increasingly routine
transfer of human tissue samples across time and space. This is certainly
true of freely given breastmilk to for-profit milk banks such as Prolacta
and Medolac in the USA, which transform the therapeutic value of the
donated milk into economic value through a variety of processed and
repackaged breastmilk derivatives (Boyer 2010 ; Hassan 2010 ); the com-
mercialisation of the ‘Mo’ cell line, created from the removal of material
taken and used without consent from John Moore’s cancerous spleen
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