Introduction: The Human Body—The Land that Time Forgot

Abstract

In Edgar Rice Burrough’s story, The Land that Time Forgot (1918), the crew of a lost U-boat stumble upon the island of Caprona where, due to isolation, the island’s creatures have taken a massively divergent evolutionary path. The modern castaways are thrust into a world where dinosaurs and neolithic humans battle for survival. The story of a lost land of prehistoric treasures is a familiar one and echoes of it can be found in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), and Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island (1874) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864). These stories all reflect a basic human desire to uncover lost secrets of the earth; but as the authors warn us, we need to be aware that when we search for such secrets we may uncover something monstrous about the world and about ourselves. One can only imagine what would happen if such a discovery were made today in the ‘real world’. Scores of nation-states and multinational corporations would no doubt rush in to claim the island’s riches as their own in an orgy of bio-piracy. In the real world, the indigenous inhabitants of Caprona might well suffer a similar fate of dispossession and cultural repression, as did the indigenous peoples of the world during the period of Western colonialism. It might well be a much sadder tale than the one of high adventure told by Burroughs. In many respects, the human body is like the Land that Time Forgot: it is the last great undiscovered country. Ancient explorers like Galen, and his more modern Enlightenment counterparts, mapped out the boundaries of this wonderful new land. But it was not until the turn of the 21st century, with the advent of human genetic science, that we truly began to penetrate into its interior mysteries. Now that we have begun to tap these mysteries, the race to discover and own them has begun. The papers in this forum lay the groundwork for understanding why this race is being run and how it might finish. The Forum begins with Grant Gillett’s analysis of the uses of human tissue in current clinical and educational settings. His analysis clearly summarises a duality of interests in human tissue use. Rightly or wrongly a divergence has grown between the expectations of the medical profession about its access to and use of human tissue and the general public’s understandings about the appropriateness of non-consensual use of human tissue. Gillett also emphasizes the danger in a monocultural approach to human tissue. The modern pluralistic state is one that has several competing community views about tissue. Any ethical response to these views must attempt to give them a voice. At the same time, Gillett forcefully argues that the non-medical population also needs to recognize that if they want the benefit of Bioethical Inquiry (2007) 4:117–118 DOI 10.1007/s11673-007-9053-6