Tissue Economies

by Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell

Waldby and Mitchell produce an account of the way that tissue taken from a body can become a commodity, and look at the problems associated with this. I like the way they present biotechnological ‘advances’ like private umbilical cord blood banking as allowing us to live in what they call a ‘double biological time’: the body ages, but the preserved fragment is meant to live on. In this case the biology doesn’t actually stack up, but the Fountain of Youth dream is powerful, even more so when we dream it on behalf of our children.