Patrick Daniel Sagcal

Dr. Ragaza

Activities 1-3

ACTIVITY 1: Discuss the pros and cons of requiring that consent forms mention specific uses for which
tissue may be retained.

PROS:

The human body is a private property. Many private properties, such as land and money stored in banks,
are defined as private properties by the fact that when people steal from these assets whatever
government in power which recognizes the private property as belonging to someone will use its power
to protect the owner and return the assets. This is the primary mode of preventing theft; when one
cannot differentiate between a sample obtained from a patient as a harmless consequence or fallout of
a medical procedure and a sample obtained through human trafficking, a consent form for the specific
use of human tissue obtained is basically required to make sure it’s from a legal source (as some sort of
receipt). A signed contract not only shows the legitimacy of the source of the tissue, but also increases
the rights of the donor such that any body part derived from their main body is theirs; as such, people
who perform medical procedures are de-incentivised to do things like steal organs mid-procedure. There
are many organs which can sell for a lot and yet can be removed without detection, such as the
gallbladder or the spleen. Beyond this, the people from whom the cells are taken from will be entitled to
financial compensation, which will not just be a positive thing in a sense that more people will donate
their abnormal cells once they realize they can be greatly paid for it, but also prevents insidious
manifestations of institutional marginalization such as ableism or racism (in the sense that they will be
used as sources of free samples).

CONS:

Despite the theory that consent forms are basically receipts and that financial compensation for human
products will incentivize people to donate abnormal cells and might lead to a boom in the discovery of
human immortal cell lines, the fact is most isolated immortalized human cell lines that achieved
widespread use were obtained illicitly, and if they were never to be obtained illicitly sampling would be
much slower and we might not have any immortalized cell lines right now at all. There are people who,
even if it is unknown how many, would refuse to give up their cells for any amount of money out of a
belief that “the body is a temple” and having their cells be of financial interest will be either a spiritual
violation, a religious sacrilege, or a form of prostitution. Given these beliefs are prevalent throughout
many cultures, the practice of obtaining cell lines from humans with abnormal physiology might become
retired.

ACTIVITY 2: Discuss what should happen in the case a person whose cells are potentially as valuable as
those of Henrietta Lacks, but who refuses to consent to their being used for any purpose other than
his own well-being.

When assessing the most optimal course of action in this scenario one must look at the frameworks for
observation to be used. It may be tempting to jump to arithmetical utilitarianism from the get-go, but
questions still need to be answered like “what are we trying to optimize?”. When you can boil the
question down to “research that can save human lives” in an inverse relationship with “inviolability of
the right of a human to his/her body” one will be looking at both degrees and motivations: Is the harm
caused by taking body parts from people against their will for research greater than the number of lives
saved by this act? Is this harm to be assessed in terms of human lives of quality of life? Is it more
important to have more people alive than to protect people from having their body parts freely stolen?
Sometimes it is the case that taking things like cell-lines end up as uncomplicated and unobstructed
procedures from which there is no harm to the patient; even though it might seem fair that they be
entitled to financial compensation while their cell lines generate massive revenue, it is not like anything
is taken from them aside from potential profit (which admittedly decides life or death to some). In these
cases what actually makes these cells a product are the technicians who work on it and the cells can be
treated as “from nature”. Once taking cells becomes intrusive, however, such a laissez faire attitude can
no longer be taken and the morality of the act must hinge on proper weighing of expectations.

ACTIVITY 3: Write a short (1000-word) essay describing a day in the life of a pathologist who is
required to adopt the “attitude of the funeral parlor” to the dissection of human bodies.

The idea here seems to be to write a story from the vantage point of one who is impaired at
their job because they treat a human corpse with the same dignity as a living human person because the
person’s organs are seen as an important part of what gives a human person that designation. As such,
they would not have a laissez-faire and functional perspective on what is essentially an object. The
debilitating effects of this kind of mindset does not need to be simulated in a story: as the demand was
merely to write an essay we can use the actual historical account of human cadaveric dissection in
Greece, 300BC onwards (Ghosh, 2015). The ancient Greeks before Herophilus and Erasitratus in their
attitude towards human corpses completely exemplify the problem statement of “narcissistic obsession
with the living body into a morbid preoccupation with the dead body” (von Staden, 1991). This
manifested in three ways: 1) the corpse, being the opposite of a living person (which had sanctity), had
the opposite of sanctity. It was considered a pollutant to the body and soul, and to the very area the
corpse is in. Second, the cutting of the skin or temnein was considered an act of sacrilege in any form
except in battle (even of animals, which had to be sliced in ritual). There was an obsession with the skin
that it was a symbol of the wholeness and integrity of any being that has it, because the concept of
“skin” came from the idea of something that binds a community together. Animal skin is neither eaten
nor burnt as sacrifice; human skin is worshipped (Epimenides). Skin was also seen as a reflection of the
condition of the being- an unvirtuous man would suffer skin diseases. As a natural map, it was
considered forbidden to carve. Temnein was also a word for violence and desecration.

Considering these matters, it is possible to imagine a man in 300BC Greece who when
confronted with a corpse on somebody who has died of leprosy would say these things:

“I do not even want to be in the same room as the corpse. It is like a human being but not at all
so. It is unclean, and the room it is in is unclean, and if I approach it I will become unclean.”

“How can I cut the skin of this person? Why would I want to violate their sanctity and
wholeness, and disassemble what it is that makes them human?”

“There is no need to dissect this corpse. Clearly, this man had lived an unvirtuous life to have a
corpse in the state it is currently in.”
 He would then go home and drink barley water. The effects of this line of thinking are also
historically noted: until 300 BC, the cranial nerves, the fourth ventricle, the internal eye structure, the
functions of the liver and ovaries, etc. were not discovered (von Staden, 1991). Not even the shape of
the heart was known. A modern pathologist who is required to give as much respect to a corpse as a
human person would never get anything does because often causative factors of disease are either
organ failures which would require surgery to inspect or are caused by parasites or microbes which tend
to collect in ducts or crevices of specific organs.

REFERENCES

Ghosh SK. Human cadaveric dissection: a historical account from ancient Greece to the modern era.
Anatomy & Cell Biology. 2015 Sep [accessed 2018 Nov 4]:153–169.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4582158/

von Staden H. The Discovery ofthe Body: Human Dissection and Its Cultural Contexts in Ancient Greece.
THE YALE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE. 1991 May 10 [accessed 2018 Nov 5]:223–241.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2589595/