Bone of Contention: Social and Ethical Implications of a Transplant Technology - A talk with Klaus Høyer February 4, 2010

New medical technologies to a great extent use material from human bodies as therapeutic tools. Whereas social science studies of such 'tools' have tended to focus on novelty and drama, this presentation concerns an old, well-entrenched and ostensibly undramatic technology: bone transfers. Recently a number of so-called technical guidelines have been developed to ensure the safety of transplant procedures using bone. Professor Høyer will explore the social and ethical implications of an ostensible technical procedure as it unfolds in a specific biopolitical context. He claims that underneath the surface of a well-entrenched transplant practice, a series of hidden dramas lingers on; and in the format of technical guidelines many important social, political, economic and ethical choices are made.

Klaus Høyer is in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study during the spring semester with the Health and Society Quadrant. While the existing literature on human tissue exchanges tends to focus on commodification of the "body" through "market" exchange as if everybody agreed on the meaning of these words, Prof. Høyer emphasizes the moral agency involved in setting up such exchanges, and points to new and hitherto unexplored aspects of tissue exchanges, in particular in relation to the ways in which money changes hands and tissue interacts with new understandings of the body. Prof. Høyer is in the department of Health Services Research at the University of Copenhagen.Quadrant is a joint initiative of the University of Minnesota Press and the Institute for Advanced Study. Quadrant is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/quadrantcal.php