Appendix G. 
253 
The "gift of life” is big business in America. 
For a nonprofit tissue bank, one typical 
donation can yield between $14,000 and 
$34,000 in downstream sales, sometimes far 
more than that. "Skins, tendons, heart 
valves, veins, and corneas are listed at about 
$110,000. Add bone from the same body, and 
one cadaver can be worth about $220,000.” 
Four of the largest nonprofit tissue banks told 
the Orange Coimty Register that together 
they expected to produce sales totaling $261 
million in 2000. (226) 
Nor is the issue of dowmstream commodification restricted to 
the sale of donated cadaveric tissue; it arises in relation to IVF 
embryos donated for research. As Dorothy Nelkin and Lori Andrews 
point out in their book. Body Bazaar . IVF patients are not generally 
told what the research involving their donated embryos will include. 
Many will be unaware that their embryos will be used to develop 
commercial stem cell lines (Nelkin and Andrews, 2001, 35). 
It is significant that even the most vocal advocates of 
procreative liberty and laissez-faire arrangements in reproductive 
matters recoil from the prospect of selling human embryos. Yet, 
although the commodification of tissue may be particularly troubling 
when it involves embryos, if there is a problem with commodifying 
and commercializing human tissue, it is a problem we confront with 
adult stem cell research as well as with hES cell work.^° Lori 
Knowles has made a similar point about being consistent in our 
moral judgments about commodifying embryos. She notes that fears 
about commodifying reproduction have led many to oppose the sale 
of embryos and to reject the idea that couples who donate embryos 
have any proprietary interest in the result of the research done with 
their embryos. As Knowles puts it, "if it is wrong to commercialize 
embryos because of their nature, then it is wrong for everyone. It is 
simply inconsistent to argue that couples should act altruistically 
because commercializing embryos is wrong, while permitting 
corporations and scientists to profit financially from cells derived by 
destroying those embryos” (Knowles, 1999, 40). 
Knowles draws attention here to the fact that there is a tension 
between our moral and legal traditions as they apply to 
developments brought about by cloning, stem cell research, and the 
existence of ex utero human embryos, among other technological 
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