CMSPT Seminar

This presentation will consider the tensions between the gift relation, the principle which underpins the regulation of blood and organ donation in most jurisdictions, and the de facto use of money incentives for some human tissues. I will review the history and reasoning that informed the framing of the gift relation as the organisational principle for blood banking in the mid-twentieth Century, and some of the ways this principle has been diluted. Drawing on fieldwork with different groups of women I will consider the ways they think about the relationship between money and one particular tissue, oocyte (human egg) donation. Oocytes are the most frankly monetised kind of tissue globally, and the interviews indicate considerable ambivalence around this status. The responses suggest that different forms of money have different ethical significance, and I will discuss the implications of this finding for regulation.

Professor Catherine Waldby is Director of the Research School of Social Sciences, at the Australian National University, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Social Science and Medicine at King’s College London. Her research focuses on social studies of biomedicine and the life sciences. Her recent books include The Global Politics of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Science: Regenerative Medicine in Transition, (with Herbert Gottweis and Brian Salter, Palgrave 2009) and Clinical Labour: Tissue donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy (with Melinda Cooper, Duke University Press 2014). With Nikolas Rose and Ilina Singh, she is the editor of BioSocieties: an interdisciplinary journal for the social studies of life sciences. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a member of the History and Philosophy committee of the Academy of Science. She has received national and international research grants for her work on stem cells, blood donation and biobanking.