Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores some of the challenges posed by medical tourism, including the impacts of this growth industry on host and destination countries and the differences in expectations and standards of care that emerge when patients cross national borders. The fields of medicine and healthcare, historically organised at a local or national scale, are being radically transformed by new communication, transport and biotechnologies that facilitate the creation of a genuinely globalised sphere of biomedical production and consumption. The Chadwick and O'Connor explore the global variation that exists in approaches to regulation of biobanks but she does so in order to demonstrate how this heterogeneity provides the conditions for the establishment of a highly variegated international marketplace for human sperm. Connell highlights that in contrast to donor, the patient is reconfigured as a consumer who is entitled to the best health they can afford.