Introduction: In the last years of the twentieth century an invisible aspect of routine medical practice in Great Britain suddenly became painfully visible. During the course of a public enquiry into what had gone wrong at the pediatric cardiac surgery unit of Bristol Royal Infirmary, it became apparent that many NHS hospitals routinely retained the internal organs of children who had died during treatment or surgery. There was an outcry in the press. One particular institution soon became the focus of attention. The Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool had, for a period in the late eighties and early nineties, engaged in a practice of retaining, not only the hearts, but many of the internal organs of children who had died there, without the explicit consent of the parents. On December 3rd 1999 the new HM Coroner for Liverpool suggested that this type of organ retention was unlawful. There was another media scrimmage, and the Government responded by announcing that there would be an independent inquiry into organ and tissue retention at Alder Hey.

In another famous case, John Moore, a U.S. leukemia patient whose tissues had been used by his doctor to develop a cell-line, sued the doctor in question for a share of the profits. The doctor had discovered that Moore's spleen cells produced an unusual blood protein that might be used to develop an anti-cancer agent, and in January 1983 the doctor and his research assistant filed a patent application. In 1984, Moore brought a lawsuit against his doctor, the regents of UCLA and the pharmaceutical companies that licensed the "Mo" cell line.

Between them, the John Moore case and the Alder Hey scandal raised a host of questions, touching on many key areas of dispute in medical ethics.  In Britain the principal issue raised by the events at Alder Hey was about informed consent: how was it that the consent procedure had broken down so badly that the parents involved had no idea that their children's internal organs were to be archived by the hospital? In America, the main political fall-out from the John Moore case concerned commodification: now that biotechnology had turned the human body into an exploitable resource potentially worth billions of dollars, who, exactly, should be allowed to profit from its products?

This presentation will take a step back from these urgent political and social questions to examine the distinction between material resources derived from the human body on the one hand, (governed by laws regarding property and the body and informed consent procedures), and, on the other hand, medical information derived from patients and their tissues, (the domain of data protection or confidentiality legislation).  The author will show that this distinction is actually far from clear and in urgent need of elucidation.