How Should We Think About Whether To Donate Our Leftover, Non-Identified Tissue to Research?

Proposed changes to the federal Common Rule that governs most human subjects research would ask patients for the first time to decide whether to allow their non-identified, leftover tissue to be used for research or thrown away. For that choice to be meaningful, the public needs to be aware of the nature, risks, and benefits of biospecimens research, and of what the proposed changes will—and will not—do. In my latest Forbes essay, "No, Donating Your Leftover Tissue To Research Is Not Like Letting Someone Rifle Through Your Phone," I consider the power of analogies and other reflections on a recent New York Times op-ed on these proposed changes by Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Comments

[Sy Ablelman]

When I die with 300K in unpaid law school student loan debt, I want to pay back that debt in some small way. I want to be turned into small green protein pellets and be fed to the starving masses living on a hot, over crowded, and environmentally stressed planet. Where people only dream about steak, strawberries, flowers and blue skies.

[anon]

Does this guy Sy ever shut up?

[Notapersona]

He does not.

[Sy Ablelman]

I passed the bar examination, I can answer anything. I am Leading Super Lawyer in Advancing and Resetting matters and I have an opinion on everything.

[Sy Ablelman]

What? You guys can't BS and Kibbitz with me? Actually, I am kinda bored over this long break and haven't seen my courthouse law buddies in 10 days. Laugh a little, you only get one walk around the block and then you become "tissue."

[anon]

"This guy Sy" is obviously a fiction. As previously noted, it is the clever and pernicious nature of false flag commentary that will bring down the FL comment sections.

Here I do not refer necessarily "Sy's" comments - as "his" comments are so demeaning and clearly designed to embarrass practitioners as to cross the line into a "camp" type humor that actually begins to provoke laughter after a while. Rare that a law prof can actually say anything that is even remotely humorous (note, the almost complete lack of any sense of humor in the FL, which is best characterized and known instead by infuriated law profs lashing out inappropriately at their critics), but, when unintended, their humor is rich indeed.

WHere is that comment policy?

[Sy Ablelman]

Hi Anon,

Sy here. You are the only one who has any objections to my solo practitioner musings about the law as it collides with life as I see it. I can't take credit for the following colloquy because it was written on a napkin by a third party early in my career, but this is how I view the law.....

Client: "Shit Happens."

Judge: "Yes, and it usually happens at intersections."

By the way, you also managed to offend a poster who goes by "brackets" who appears reasonably intelligent (above a 70 IQ) like me. Monoculture is not healthy for nature. If I were King of a law school, I wouldn't want to hire only solos like me; I would hire one former prosecutor.

[anon]

"Sy," as I said, very funny. This last comment was a gem. Incoherently written, implausibly stated, and a true parody of the caricature of practitioners held by law profs, which I understand to be your intention. Well done! You are actually making the case many have made here in the FL about law profs being so totally out of touch. This puppet is their dark vision "personified."

As I said, my comment wasn't necessarily directed at "you" in particular (though, your game here is clear). Yet, indeed you may be the straw that breaks the FL comment section! ANd that may be your bigger goal.

Congrats!

FL: Where is the comment policy?

[Sy Ablelman]

Holy Crap, I have never been bestowed and bequeathed with that much power! Not even my clients wearing Budweiser frog shirts at their DUI probation violation hearings think this highly of me! To bring down the "Fl Blog" with the power of my good looks is the zenith of my sagacity and probity. Anon, you are amazing to give a schlepper like me so much credit!

[Lois Turner]

Obvious sock-puppet faux-dialogue between Sy and anon, who are actually the same gormless person.

[Sy Ablelman]

Gormless, (adj);lacking in intelligence, common sense. I had to look that up. If I said that in court, I would be sent to lockup immediately after the judge Googled it on her I-Phone. So much for civility. Did you know that the first definition of gorilla according the Merriam Webster dictionary is a "tribe of hairy women in an account of a voyage." You made me get off my recliner to get the dictionary... See, I can ad to the intellect here too!

[anon]

I think it's time to enforce the comment policy. This is getting out of hand and is greatly devaluing this site.

[Sy Ablelman]

This isn't Wheaton College, you know!

[Michelle Meyer]

anon at 10:51: there is no general comment policy for TFL (that I am aware of). Each blogger deals with comments as he or she will. (By the way, anon at 4:19 and 7:20, the comment brouhaha to which you allude occurred before I joined TFL as a permablogger, so I've made no promises to you. Kindly stop using my thread to complain about that.) Normally, my policy is to be quite tolerant of dumb and off-topic comments (of which there are a great many on the Internet, as you may have noticed), so long as they do not cross civility or various other lines.

That said, I don't know what I did to deserve this particular exchange among TFL's resident pseuds taking place on my watch, and if for no other reason than to stop all the emails from Typepad alerting me to the latest volley, I'm going to start deleting any comment in this thread that isn't on point. (To be clear: none of the prior comments have been on point.)