This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel War Burton.

Philosophy bites is available at

www philosophy bites.com.

Do we own our bodies? It sounds like an odd question, but it's linked to another

one. Do we have the right to sell our body parts? There's an urgency to such issues because of

the rise of the biotechnology industry.

Huge sums can be made by exploiting research based on body parts, human tissue, organs, eggs and

so on.

Corporations have made millions from patenting genes.

Donald Dickinson, author of body shopping, argues that the commodification of the body has gone too far.

John Dickinson, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much, Nigel. I'm really pleased to be here.

I'm very excited about your project.

Now, the topic we want to focus on today is the question,

who owns your body that's fairly obvious isn't

I own my body I was sort of hoping you would say that because in good philosophical

gadfly tradition I'm going to show you that no your preconception is wrong.

It's wrong in the common law because once tissue is taken from your body it doesn't belong to you anymore. It becomes what's known as

Ries Nulius, no one's thing. And that brings me into the second reason why it's wrong because

traditionally it didn't really matter whether tissue taken from your body belonged to you or not because there

was no financial value attached to it.

It was assumed that once you had the tissue taken out, it was taken out because it was

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