Abstract
The procurement and storage of human tissue and body parts has a long tradition in human history. The development of Western science – especially anatomy – was based, among other prerequisites, on the collection of human corpses and their parts. Similarly, a long-standing Western religious tradition involved retaining the remains of saints and holy objects for religious practices. Although the Enlightenment led to a kind of alienation of the public with regard to such habits and practices for religious purposes, our contemporary museums are full of human remains which were collected for scientific demonstration, curiosity, or both. For example, there was a discussion in Germany in 2010 as to whether two heads of Maori warriors could be shown in public (in an anthropological collection) or should be given back to the people of New Zealand. The German Hygiene Museum in Dresden has the complete and well-prepared body of a Lilliputian on exhibition, with unknown scientific value. And finally, thousands of spectators in Europe visited the Body Worlds exhibition of Gunther von Hagens. Beneath this open public fascination with the secrets of the human body in its various forms, institutions of medical therapy and research routinely store thousands of samples each day. In particular, the organ retention scandals in Ireland and the United Kingdom revealed that storing tissues and body parts was often done without the consent or even the knowledge of the concerned persons or their relatives in the past.
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Notes
- 1.
The so-called “Volkszählungsurteil”: Urteil vom 15. Dezember 1983 (BVerfGE 65, 1). Available at: http://zensus2011.de/fileadmin/material/pdf/gesetze/volkszaehlungsurteil_1983.pdf (accessed 17 March 2011).
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G. Rayner, Ch. Hope, and A. Porter, “Ministers ‘ignored data security warnings’,” The Telegraph, November 22, 2007, accessed October 21, 2010, http://www.Telegraph.co.uk.
- 3.
EU Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, 4. IV. 1997, Art. 11 – Non-discrimination: “Any form of discrimination against a person on grounds of his or her genetic heritage is prohibited.” EU Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC), Art. 8.1: “Member States shall prohibit the processing of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade-union membership, and the processing of data concerning health or sex life.”
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Th. Lemke, “‘A slap in the face’: An exploratory study of genetic discrimination in Germany,” Genomics, Society and Policy 5 (2): 2009, 22–39.
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S.E. Forsythe, “China’s organ market: A tale of prisoners, tourists, and lies,” The New Atlantis, Summer 2009, 121–24.
- 6.
To use a term which was coined by the German lawyer Nils Hoppe in his book entitled Bioequity – Property and the Human Body. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing (2009).
- 7.
Personal data is defined in the EU Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC) as “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity; […]”.
- 8.
J.A. Bovenberg, “Whose tissue is it anyway?” Nature Biotechnology 37: August 2005, reprinted in Property Rights in Blood, Genes and Data: Naturally Yours? Brill/Martinus Nijhoff Academic Publishers, Leiden, Boston (http://www.brill.nl), MA, 2006.
- 9.
For the purposes of this chapter, residual embryos created following in vitro fertilisation (IVF) will be included alongside human tissue. The issue as to whether or not they are considered human tissue is debatable.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Silvia Schnorrer for her excellent work in the proofreading, indexing, and communicating with the contributors in the preparation of the final manuscript.
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Lenk, C., Sándor, J., Gordijn, B. (2011). Introduction. In: Lenk, C., Sándor, J., Gordijn, B. (eds) Biobanks and Tissue Research. The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1673-5_1
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