ABSTRACT
Historically, the commercial value of medical records, bioinformation, and gene patents emerged after the regulatory structures of bioethics came into being (Winickoff 2003: 188-90). For some bioethicists and policy-makers, benefit
sharing becomes a necessary corrective for a system that previously ignored important questions of distributive justice (Simm 2005). But as a norm, benefit sharing has also been framed in relation to a second goal. As Canadian jurist Bartha Knoppers has put it, benefit sharing seeks to avoid both ‘biopiracy with no return to benefits to the families or community’, and ‘commodification of the person through payment for access to DNA’ (Knoppers 2000: 212-4). Benefit sharing, in other words, seeks to address the inequities of an appropriation of resource value from research participants, but without recourse to quid pro quo payment. Searching for an elusive middle way on the contested question of bodily property,1 benefit sharing attempts to stitch a distributive norm at the seam of the market and gift economies.
