In Me We Trust: Public Health, Personalized Medicine, and the Common Good

Half of the population refuses to accept transfusions from public blood banks, trusting blood taken only from a family member or personally banked stocks. Is this just another example of Americans’ ruggedly individualistic distrust of all things public?

You might well think so, but the population in question is European. The finding comes from a Eurobarometer survey of European public opinion, evidence of increasingly transnational misgivings about what sociologist Richard Titmuss described in The Gift Relationship as the quintessential symbol of social solidarity: blood donation. In the wake of a series of scandals in France, Great Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, blood donation is becoming personalized and privatized on a global level.

Another symbol of our common humanity, the human genome, likewise faces the threat of biomedical privatization. The original vision of the human genome was communitarian. It was seen to be the common property of humanity. Article 1 of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, issued in 1997, states that “the human genome underlines the fundamental unity of all members of the human family...