Organs

Organ donor - 'aaaahh, you've got an organ goin', no wonder the sound has so much body.'

__Doyle__

Doyle offers an idea for starting a company based on the premise that one could ‘get paid now for a future interest in your possibly healthy organs.’ This company could, presumably, finance counternarratives to the information produced ‘where money and information clusters’ (174). In the vision of this chapter, for technoscience to be derritorialized, bodies would also have to be deterritorialized (175). ‘Before the American postoedipal body can be turned into a futures market for a distributed technoscience, new tactics must be invented to deterritorialize bodies coded by autonomy’ (175).

At first I saw no connection between democratizing science and organ donation (for profit). It seems that ‘deterritorialization’ is the connection point for Doyle, but is it clear to anyone why he chose to join these two subjects? Perhaps Doyle's implicitly showing that in order to make decisions about organ donation we have to be (or should be) bioethicists, thus democratizing scientific decision making?

__Reddy__

‘It would have been easy enough to dismiss such “universal aspirations” as common clichés but for the “specific situations” of ethnographic engagement that make clear how abstractions are used in common interactions (Tsing 2005:2,9)’ (Reddy, 461).

As someone who wants my own research to be directly useful for those working for social justice, helping to provide marginalized groups with greater chances for empowerment, making wiser and fairer decisions, etc. I have found it difficult to understand scientists’ push for ‘basic’ research. Sure, ‘basic’ research might help somebody, eventually, but if minor changes can be made that would increase the chances of contributing to fighting a specific disease, for example, why not make these changes (see Deborah Heath’s ‘modest intervention’ between Marfan syndrome activists and biologists)?. I have largely seen the rhetoric calling for basic research funding as self-interested and deceitful, but Reddy illuminates somewhat the not-necessarily-disingenuous ideology or ethics that may underlie support for basic research.

Reddy’s paper drew a partial parallel between Indians in Houston who donated blood for ‘research’ and the scientists who would eventually conduct this research. Both groups subscribed to a kind of ‘ethics of alienation’ in which their ‘gifts,’ once out of their hands, followed unknown trajectories. Donors and scientists of basic research need not know who their gift might benefit (or how) as long as they had a belief that it would serve the ‘greater good.’ Thus a valorizing of ‘disinterested exchange,’ which has various roots in different contexts, may motivate both the ‘free’ giving of blood for research and the actions of basic science researchers in general. The gift is more ‘pure’ when it cannot be reduced to calculated intentions with specific benefits in mind. But if ‘research’ did not generally ‘automatically’ lead to benefits for the greater good, then this ethics of ‘alienation’ from motivation and recipients would quickly fall apart. Reddy’s study, which grappled with a surprising //lack// of conflict over blood donation, illustrates the strength of the ‘science = progress’ trope, even in the face of recent, highly contested programs such as the HGDP.

‘Pure’ knowledge, then, coming from ‘pure’ research, free from specific motivations and, therefore, more ‘objective,’ is more highly valued, at least within the scientific community.

__Scheper-Hughes__

Is the ‘international, multi-million dollar business in tissues and body parts, obtained from naïve donors who believe their gifts are being used in heroic rescues to save lives and comfort burn victims’ still as unregulated as when Scheper-Hughes was writing in 2001 (p. 5)?

Scheper-Hughes writes that ‘the magical transformation of a person into a “life” that must be prolonged, saved, at any cost, has made life into the ultimate fetish as recognized many years ago by Ivan Illich ‘ (9). This fetishization of life ‘erases any possibility of a social ethic (10). Doyle writes similarly that ‘organ donation discourse is bogged down by the sappy, oedipal recuperation of organ donation as the “gift of life”’ (175). I’m still not sure I understand the dangers of ‘vitalism,’ but it seems that one problem could be that appeals to the sanctity of ‘life’ could shut down debates too early and disallow the proliferation of discourses on subjects such as abortion, the ‘right to die,’ and what kinds of (potentially) life-saving research should be conducted.

__Needs/Desires/Fetishes__

But if Scheper-Hughes, Doyle, Illich, are arguing that we're all 'life fetishists' who think we 'need' life, doesn't the term 'need' lost all meaning? I still think everyone in the world should have sufficient food to survive. At a basic level I think people do 'need' food. This is because they die without it. Needs and desires certainly blur, but I think it's a good general principle that the 'needs' in a group should be met before 'luxury goods' are held by a few. How can we have a conversation about needs?