This book puts the ethics, policy and politics of stem cells into context in a way that helps readers understand why past and current issues have developed the way they have and what the implications are for their work going forward. It also addresses emerging issues as the field progresses towards clinical and industrial uses. While there is a superabundance of material on the ethics of embryo use and questions of embryonic "personhood," there is little that covers what practicing scientists and managers need to know in order to plan and execute responsible research. Furthermore, researchers funded by the NIH are required to have ethics training as a condition of the grant. As such, this book is an essential resource to all of these pre-professional students whether they plan to move into industry, government or academia.

This book puts the ethics, policy and politics of stem cells into context in a way that helps readers understand why past and current issues have developed the way they have and what the implications are for their work going forward. It also addresses emerging issues as the field progresses towards clinical and industrial uses. While there is a superabundance of material on the ethics of embryo use and questions of embryonic "personhood," there is little that covers what practicing scientists and managers need to know in order to plan and execute responsible research. Furthermore, researchers funded by the NIH are required to have ethics training as a condition of the grant. As such, this book is an essential resource to all of these pre-professional students whether they plan to move into industry, government or academia.

"In this provocative ethnography, Hogle reveals how the uses of human tissue and organs as therapeutic agents are intimately related not only to expanding arenas of commodification, but also to the politics of nationalism. A challenge to received wisdom about bodies and persons."-Margaret Lock, author of Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America "This astonishing portrait of changing understandings of life and death is both profound and revolutionary. While extending classical debates about body parts as gifts and as commodities, it brilliantly transfigures them. Unparalleled in its field, this powerful book redefines the future of medical anthropology."-Sarah Franklin, Reader in Cultural Anthropology, Lancaster University (England) The body is both a site for medical practice and a source of tools for therapeutic and scientific uses. There are many meanings ascribed to the body that both affect and are affected by numerous cultural, economic, political and legal issues. In order to procure and use body organs and tissues, Linda F. Hogle states, scientists enlist a wide array of cultural assumptions. Nowhere is this more evident than in present-day Germany, where the specter of Nazi medical experimentation still plays a large role in national policies governing treatment of both living and dead bodies and the way these policies are put into practice. In their efforts to distance themselves from the atrocities of the past, German medical practitioners and policy-makers have reformulated ideas of bodily violation. Furthermore, the reunification of East and West Germany has engendered new questions about the relationship between individuals' bodies, science, and the state. Recovering the Nation's Body is the first book to analyze the actual practices involved in procuring human body parts, and the first to examine how the German past and the unique present-day situation within the European Union are keys to understanding the forms that medical practice takes within various cultural contexts. Linda F. Hogle is a fellow at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics. She has written widely on the anthropology of science and on bioethics and cultural diversity.