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AUDIENCE: Hello, my name
is Barbara Prainsack.
I'm a professor at the Department
of Social Science, Health, and
Medicine at King's College, London.
As a department, we look at
all the ways in which health
is more than a medical matter.
We're an interdisciplinary
department.
And my own work focuses
on societal, ethical,
and regulatory aspects
of DNA testing and DNA
databasing, specifically.
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What I will talk about today are
some of the societal challenges
in and for tissue research and
how the concept of solidarity
can potentially help us address
some of those challenges.
I will start by outlining
some of the challenges.
Then I will say a few words
about the concept of solidarity.
And I will also say a few
things about the meaning
of solidarity vis-a-vis
other related concepts,
such as altruism or reciprocity.
And as a third step,
I will outline if solidarity
can help us in addressing
those challenges,
how it can help us to do so.
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As many people would
know, tissue research
is one of the key fields of medical
research and actually medicine.
Almost every aspect of
medicine relies on tissue
research in one way or another.
And while it is difficult to
delineate the field of tissue
research precisely, there
are several ways in which
we can classify tissue research.
One way of classifying it would be
to look at the types of tissue that
are being used,
including blood, bone,
ova, eggs, embryos, fetal
tissue, neural tissue, or even
whole organs.
Another way of classifying
tissue research
would be to look at what
the tissue is used for.
And in terms of research, it
could be used, for example,
in the field of drug development,
where as we know animal studies
have findings that cannot be
directly transposed to clinical
applications for humans.
So that would be one area in
which tissue is used for research.
But there are, of
course, other uses,
so that is the second type of
classifying tissue research.
Another type would be to look at
whether the tissue is a byproduct
of clinical practice or whether
it was collected and stored
for research purposes explicitly.
And another way of
classifying it would
be according to what
people the issue
comes from, what type of person.
Would it be living people?
Or would it be tissue
from deceased people?
