Life, Death, and Humanity

Guide Rating -

Modern biotechnology is creating ethical questions faster than most people can properly consider and learn to understand them, much less develop coherent and reasonable answers. We need time and resources to think about what is at stake and what we should do - much of our future as a species may depend upon how we deal with these ethical issues today and in the coming years.

Among the resources we need to use are books which are able to explain what the critical issues are and what new challenges modern biotechnology poses. One such book, edited by David Magnus, Arthur L. Caplan, and Glenn McGee, is "Who Owns Life?" These three experts on biotechnology issues and bioethics have chosen a series of excellent articles from a variety of authors, including philosophers, legal scholars, specialists in medical ethics, and more.

There are many books on bioethics available today, but that's not surprising because bioethics involves so many different questions and problems. This particular cluster of ethical issues is centered around the problem of ownership and control over the products of biological process - both our own biological process and those occurring elsewhere in the natural world. Can it be said that we own our bodies or even parts of our bodies? Are gene sequences isolated from our chromosomes "inventions" that deserve patents? Are cloned or genetically engineered organisms "inventions"? Should scientists be allowed to claim patents on and make profits from the most basic elements of life?

Questions about the nature, extent, and consequences of ownership and property are complicated and interesting in their own right, but modern biotechnology can challenge many of our traditional assumptions on these topics. Of course, that's the point of a good ethical problem; unfortunately, if our answers are wrong here, a great deal of suffering can result.

This is not an idle concern. The focus on ownership and patenting biological products has led to an increase in the influence of business practices in science and medical research - and not necessarily for the better. One of the problems is the need for secrecy in the conducting of business, something which is a hinderance to the scientific process and possibly fatal to the rest of us:

[Several] private life sciences companies in 1999 refused to share crucial genetic sequence information with public health authorities and federal researchers on at least six lethal microbes - among them Staphylococcus aureus, the most common source of life-threatening bacterial infections in hosptials; Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which causes TB; and Enterococcus faecalis, second only to staph as a cause of potentially life-threatening hospital infections - pending resolution of their various patent claims.

There is also the question of exploitation of other human beings. There are thousands of individuals whose body tissues have been used to create tissue cultures for scientific research. You can buy these cultures from specialty catalogs and they are certainly a boon for medical investigations - but few of the "donors" have any idea that others are marketing and profiting from their genes and tissues. Is that ethical or unethical?

How you answer such questions will depend a great deal upon how you view the debate over whether you or anyone can own your body or portions of your body, an issue which is given a great deal of attention in this book. There is currently little legal basis for claims of people to "own" their bodies, a not unreasonable consequence of concerns about the implications of anyone being able to "own" any portion of another human being. Could we become judged by the market value of our organs and other parts? Could an person be turned down for welfare benefits because she has in her a kidney worth $50,000?

However, medical institutions - and only medical institutions - can claim such ownership in certain circumstances. This is a special exception which seems to be derived from a time when grave robbing, generally done to acquire body parts to sell to medical researchers, was never treated as a felony.

Although some have tried to solve the many dilemmas raised in this book by simple appeals to facts, the facts alone won't solve anything. How we interpret, weigh, and ultimately use those facts depends a great deal upon the values we bring to the discussion. How we make the various distinctions between proper and improper use of biological products frequently says more about our values than it does the "facts" being discussed. Two individuals (or societies) with different values could potentially agree on the facts surrounding an issue without also agreeing on what those facts imply.

This is where the book both shines and, ultimately, is flawed. The book is more than just a collection of facts and descriptions, because the contributing authors generally make a point to discuss the fundamental values they are using to arrive at their conclusions. A study of the values one might use is key in helping people arrive at their own conclusions.

The flaw, however, is in the lack of diversity in the values and positions articulated. I would have preferred to read some radically different perspectives on what it might mean to "own" human bodies and human body parts or on the very principles behind patenting biological products. Such articles would have helped readers understand divergent viewpoints and arrive at better personal conclusions because they would have a better grasp of the different possible values a person can bring to the discussion.

This flaw is not a reason not to read this book, however, because there is no denying that the material which is provided is interesting and useful. What the flaw does mean is that readers should make an effort to consult more than just this book - as good as it is, it doesn't quite rise to the level of "one stop shopping" when it comes to learning about the issues it addresses.