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My name is Donna Dickenson.
And I'm Emeritus
professor of Medical
Ethics at the University of London.
I'm going to be speaking
to you today on the topic
of human tissue and global ethics.
0:12
We now have a situation where there
is a global trade in human tissue.
And in a book I wrote
about five years ago,
I called this trade body shopping.
And this is an international
trade, which began really
as a trade in human
eggs and sperm sold
by private banks and IVF clinics.
And I think that aspect
is quite widely known,
sometimes called rather
flippantly, reproductive tourism.
And two examples of that are this
US college newspaper advertisement,
which was headed,
Girls sell your eggs
and enjoy the night life of Chennai!
The idea being that American, female
college students would go to India,
go to Chennai and would undergo
the rather laborious process
of egg extraction, at
the same time would
be able to enjoy the nightlife.
And here's another
example of this slightly
flip attitude towards reproductive
tourism towards the global trade.
And this is from the founder
of a commercial egg and sperm
bank called beautiful people.
And he said, everyone,
including ugly people,
would like to bring good
looking children into the world
and we can't be selfish with
our attractive gene pool.
1:24
Now, that is the rather
flip approach to what is
actually a very serious question.
And what is actually a very
complex market in human tissue.
To stay with the topic of
eggs for the time being,
the market in human eggs is
differentiated by what buyers
think are desirable phenotypes.
And I hasten to say that I don't
think there's anything particularly
desirable about any of these.
There's a slightly
eugenic take to this.
But the market in human eggs
does reward certain phenotypes.
And those tend to be musicality,
high intelligence, height,
tall height, athletic
ability, and blonde hair color
seems to be rewarded.
Now, this is actually
in contravention
of professional guidelines,
even in America,
where this market is
perhaps most complex.
And the American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists
has actually stipulated that
there should be no higher
payment than $5,000 for human eggs.
But the so-called
right traits, that is
the ones that I've just enumerated,
can command up to 10 times that.
And this is not just
limited to America.
The reason why the advert was
targeting American female students
for a Chennai clinic is that
in India, in southern India
in this case, European or American
egg sellers of European extraction
can also command high
prices because of fair skin
as a desirable phenotype.
Of course, that's not
really a guarantee at all
that the genotype will
come out that way.
