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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.
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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.
