Stuff Essay

It’s Not Our Tissue!
The one thing we as humans come into this world with is our bodies and everything that they encompass, but we don’t need to prove this by legally owning them. If there are people in this world that understand how our bodies work better than we do, they should have the right to use our tissues to help us now and for the future. This can’t be done if we have the right to say, for some nonsense and uneducated reason, that we don’t want our tissues preserved and researched. The common person (by common I mean someone not as advanced and intelligent as someone in the medical or scientific field) does not truly understand how much of an advantage our tissues give us as a human race. There is absolutely no good reason or rhyme for us to say “no” to professionals that truly want to help maintain our bodies.
If it weren’t for the removal and preservation of tissues, we would not be as advanced as we now our in medicine or science. As stated by Vincent Racaniello in the Afterword of the Immortal Life if Henrietta Lacks referring to the Lacks family being able to maybe withdraw HeLa cells, “The impact that would have on science is inconceivable.” (Skloot, 2010)   Not only have tissues helped us learn about the tissues themselves, but professionals have also been able to make vaccines, discover cures, and also find preventable measures to avoid certain illnesses. Without those tissues, we would have no tests for diseases like hepatitis and H.I.V.; no vaccines for polio, smallpox, measles; none of the new promising drugs for leukemia, breast cancer, and colon cancer.   (Catalona, 2006) And without tissue samples, the developers of those products would be out billions of dollars. Besides all of the medical advantages we made, researching our tissues has helped us learn about our bodies as a whole. We now know almost everything there is to know about them, including conditions. Without doctors using our tissues to their and our advantage, our life would be...