In Me We Trust: Public Health, Personalized Medicine, and the Common Good
By Donna Dickenson,
The Hedgehog Review
| 03. 12. 2014
Half of the population refuses to accept transfusions from public blood banks, trusting blood taken only from a family member or personally banked stocks. Is this just another example of Americans’ ruggedly individualistic distrust of all things public?
You might well think so, but the population in question is European. The finding comes from a Eurobarometer survey of European public opinion, evidence of increasingly transnational misgivings about what sociologist Richard Titmuss described in The Gift Relationship as the quintessential symbol of social solidarity: blood donation. In the wake of a series of scandals in France, Great Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, blood donation is becoming personalized and privatized on a global level.
Another symbol of our common humanity, the human genome, likewise faces the threat of biomedical privatization. The original vision of the human genome was communitarian. It was seen to be the common property of humanity. Article 1 of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, issued in 1997, states that “the human genome underlines the fundamental unity of all members of the human family...
Related Articles
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 03.20.2024
There is a new most expensive drug ever—a gene therapy that costs as much as a Brooklyn brownstone or a Miami mansion, and more than the average person will earn in a lifetime.
Lenmeldy is a gene treatment for metachromatic...
By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 03.10.2024
In 1889, a French doctor named Francois-Gilbert Viault climbed down from a mountain in the Andes, drew blood from his arm and inspected it under a microscope. Dr. Viault’s red blood cells, which ferry oxygen, had surged 42 percent. He...
By Billy Perrigo, TIME | 03.11.2024
The U.S. government must move “quickly and decisively” to avert substantial national security risks stemming from artificial intelligence (AI) which could, in the worst case, cause an “extinction-level threat to the human species,” says a report commissioned by the U.S...
By Gerry Smith, Bloomberg | 03.12.2024
When Celenise Mahmood first learned about two new gene therapies that could cure sickle cell disease, she felt a wave of relief.
Her 9-year-old son, Navid, has the inherited blood disorder. By age 5, he’d had over 30 life-saving blood...