People donate organs, tissue, and blood to help others and sometimes to be stored for later use in case of personal medical needs. Human tissue from certain demographic groups, usually people with very specific ethnic backgrounds, can be used for life-saving research which would not otherwise be possible.
Most donors have altruist motives, believing that their tissue will be used for the purposes they agreed to, but donors have little or no control over what really happens once they give a part of themselves away, turning what was once an act of charity into a property and privacy issue.
Human tissue carries very revealing and very personal DNA. Anything that is learned from a tissue sample can be traced back to the donor. A donor may give samples for the purpose of researching a cure for a life-threatening disease and later find that studies conducted on the tissue included mental illness or certain behaviors, all of which can be traced back to the donor.
To read about surgical errors on the Personal Injury Directory, click here.
