ABSTRACT
This chapter calls for greater attention on the part of resource geographers to human biological resources: the cells, tissues, and organs of the human body that are transformed into scientific research tools and new medical therapies. It focuses specifically on the use of blood, eggs, sperm, breast milk, and other biological materials in the tissue economies of medicine and the life sciences, and on the biobank and the fertility clinic as key institutional sites in the human tissue economy. Like animal, mineral, and other material entities more familiar to resource geographers, human biological resources are subject to discursive framings through notions of scarcity and surplus that shape their value. The chapter explores how researchers in geography, anthropology, and sociology have addressed the multiplicity of values and meanings attached to human biological materials as gifts and commodities. It argues for closer dialogue between resource geographers and those interested in the material practices of the biobanking, fertility, and other human tissue economies. A resource geography that encompasses human biological resources could generate new insights into how the dynamics of extraction, commodification, and exchange blur the boundaries between the body and the environment.
