A survey of the rapidly expanding economies of exchange in human blood, tissues, and organs, explaining the complex issues at stake and suggesting likely developments

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Gifts, Commodities, and Human Tissues 1
Part I. Tissue Banks: Managing the Tissue Economy 31
1. Blood Banks, Risk, and Autologous Donation: The Gift of Blood to Oneself 35
2. Disentangling the Embryonic Gift: The UK Stem Cell Bank 59
Part II. Waste and Tissue Economies 83
3. The Laws of Mo(o)re: Waste, Biovalue, and Information Ecologies 88
4. Umbilical Cord Blood: Waste, Gift, Venture Capital 110
Part III. Biogifts of Capital 131
5. Commodity-Communities and Corporate Commons 135
6. Real-Time Demand: Information, Regeneration, and Organ Markets 160
Conclusion: The Future of Tissue Economies 181
Notes 189
Bibliography 207
Index 227

Catherine Waldby teaches medical sociology at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine and AIDS and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference.

Robert Mitchell is Assistant Professor of English at Duke University. He is a coeditor of Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information and Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body.