A01=Lesley A. Sharp
animals
Author_Lesley A. Sharp
bioengineering
black market
Category=JHM
current debate
debates in science
designing implantable mechanical devices
determination
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethics
experimentation
fleshy organs from animals for human use
health care
human body
human form
human parts
human suffering
life and death
marketing of organs
medicine
moral thinking
morality
organ donation
organ scarcity
organ transplant
organ transplantation
organs
scarcity
science
surgery
surgical
theoretical
treatment
xenotransplantation
Product details
- ISBN 9780520277984
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 02 Nov 2013
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In The Transplant Imaginary, author Lesley Sharp explores the extraordinarily surgically successful realm of organ transplantation, which is plagued worldwide by the scarcity of donated human parts, a quandary that generates ongoing debates over the marketing of organs as patients die waiting for replacements. These widespread anxieties within and beyond medicine over organ scarcity inspire seemingly futuristic trajectories in other fields. Especially prominent, longstanding, and promising domains include xenotransplantation, or efforts to cull fleshy organs from animals for human use, and bioengineering, a field peopled with "tinkerers" intent on designing implantable mechanical devices, where the heart is of special interest. Scarcity, suffering, and sacrifice are pervasive and, seemingly, inescapable themes that frame the transplant imaginary. Xenotransplant experts and bioengineers at work in labs in five Anglophone countries share a marked determination to eliminate scarcity and human suffering, certain that their efforts might one day altogether eliminate any need for parts of human origin.
A premise that drives Sharp's compelling ethnographic project is that high-stakes experimentation inspires moral thinking, informing scientists' determination to redirect the surgical trajectory of transplantation and, ultimately, alter the integrity of the human form.
Lesley Sharp is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Senior Research Scientist in Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. She is the author of Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self.
