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Regulating Transfer and Use of Fetal Tissue in Transplantation Procedures: The Ethical Dimensions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2021

Nikki Melina Constantine Bell
Nikki Melina Constantine Bell*
Affiliation:
Hofstra University; Boston University
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Extract

For twenty years scientists have worked to find an effective treatment to ease the quivering, the stiffness, and the difficulty in controlling bodily movements which are the primary symptoms of Parkinson's disease. The disease can be treated with L-dopa, a drug that mimics the dopamine that coordinates neural transmission in the human brain, which Parkinson's sufferers have ceased to produce in sufficient quantities. The L-dopa, however, produces damaging side-effects and sometimes proves ineffectual. Researchers discovered in animal experiments that the effects of a laboratory-developed disease simulating Parkinson's disease could be mitigated using fetal brain tissue transplants, which produced the natural dopamine the animals’ cells failed to produce adequately.

These experiments were replicated with human subjects, and fetal tissue transplants have shown great potential as a treatment for Parkinson's disease. Fetal tissue is ideal for transplantation because it is in a stage of primitive development in which it adjusts easily to a new environment.

Type
Articles
Information
American Journal of Law & Medicine , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , 1994 , pp. 277 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics and Boston University 1994

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References

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39 Id. Specifically, plaintiffs claimed that the HHS could not effect a permanent ban without a § 553 rule making, and therefore violated the Administrative Procedure Act. McRae, 448 U.S. at 297.

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44 Unif. Anatomical Gift Act § 3.

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67 Jehovah's Witnesses are a religious group whose doctrine forbids the receipt of blood transfusions. See, e.g., Shorter v. Drury, 695 P.2d 116 (Wash. 1985).

68 Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Dep't of Health, 497 U.S. 261 (1990).

69 Determinism [is] [t]he philosophical view that maintains that all events in the universe, including all human events, are absolutely determined or conditioned by necessary and sufficient antecedent causes. The determinist denies, therefore, the reality of randomness or chance in nature and rejects human free will. Every action is the result of a necessary chain of causes. Ethics and the Search for Values 513 (Luis E. Navia & Eugene Kelly eds., 1980).

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85 112 S. Ct. 2791 (1992).

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87 See supra note 50 and accompanying text.

88 Nolan, supra note 59, at 16-17.

89 See Moore v. Regents of the Univ. of Calif., 793 P.2d 479 (1990). In the Moore case, the California Supreme Court decided that the plaintiff did not state a cause of action for conversion when his doctor, without informing him, developed a commercially valuable cell line using his therapeutically removed spleen. The court commented that “the laws governing such things as human tissues, transplantable organs, blood, fetuses, pituitary glands, corneal tissue, and dead bodies deal with human biological materials as sui generis, regulating their disposition to achieve policy goals rather than abandoning them to the general law of personal property.” Id. at 489. A person's control of his body tissue is limited “in the sense that [the law] prohibits him from taking the removed part to his home and keeping it on his mantel.” Id. at 503. However, the court declared that “ ‘scientific use’ contrary to the patient's expressed wish” should be prohibited. Id. at 492.

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103 Id.

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105 Id.

106 Nolan, supra note 59, at 14. See Paul Ramsey, the Ethics of Fetal Research 98-99 (1975).

107 Nolan, supra note 59, at 14. See Ramsey, supra note 106, at 99.

108 Nolan, supra note 59, at 14-15.

109 Robertson, supra note 73, at 7. In the context of a woman conceiving a fetus merely to abort it as if it were a “renewable” tissue like blood or sperm, Kathleen Nolan writes:

[P]art of the horror associated with the thought of a woman using a fetus purely to benefit herself or another springs from an ineluctable subconscious association of this act with a primordial or archetypal image—that of a mother turning and eating her child. The intended beneficence of the act is impotent to wash away the defilement implicit in such imagery.

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112 Id. at 163-64.

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114 Benjamin Ginzburg, the Adventure of Science 78, 87-89 (1930).

115 Aristotle believed that both the earth and the body were composed of four humors: black bile (earth), blood (air), yellow bile (fire), and phlegm (water). Anatomy was conceptualized by analogy to the earth rather than by observation.

116 See Stephen W. Hawking, a Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988).

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