Human Tissue Act 2004 Human Tissue Act 2004 The Human Tissue Act 2004 (c 30) is an act of the UK parliament applying to England, Northern Ireland and Wales. It consolidates previous legislation and created the Human Tissue Authority to "regulate the removal, storage, use and disposal of human bodies, organs and tissue." The Act was brought about as a consequence of, among things, the Alder Hey organs scandal, in which organs of children had been retained by the Alder Hey Children's Hospital without consent, and the Kennedy inquiry into heart surgery on children at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. A consultative exercise followed the
Traditional Chinese medicines derived from the human body centuries after Li Shizhen considered the bioethical and biomedical dilemmas of using human drugs, 20th-century technological and medical advances have raised new related questions of organ transplants, transplantation medicine, organ trade, tissue banks, human cloning, and the commodification of human body parts (Awaya 1999, Nie 2002, Scheper-Hughes and Wacquant 2002). Traditional Chinese medicines derived from the human body Li Shizhen's (1597) "Bencao gangmu", the classic materia medica of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), included 35 human drugs, including organs, bodily fluids, and excreta. Crude drugs derived from the human body were commonplace in the early history of medicine. Some of these