Law Commons^™

Gift Giving To Biobanks, Leonard H. Glantz, Patricia Roche, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

We agree with Mark Rothstein's goal of giving tissue donors control over their donated tissues. But we think using the research model as the basis for attaining this goal, while widely employed and accepted, should be abandoned.

The research regulations were originally adopted to deal with interventions on living human beings, not on the tissue of human beings. The Nuremberg Code (a reaction to concentration camp experiments), the Willowbrook experiment, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the other examples of the abuse of research subjects that provided the rationale for regulating research on human subjects clearly had nothing to do with …