FEATURES | Issue: "Face-off" August 13, 2011

Fetal attraction

Abortion | Aborted babies provide the vast majority of fetal tissue used in American medical research. Demand is high, competition for the tissue is strong, and oversight may be taking a back seat | Daniel James Devine

Associated Press/Photo by Noah Berger

H. Ronald Zielke is a bank director. His institution collected $1.4 million in federal funds last year—but inside, you won't find money. You'll find human tissue.

Zielke's bank is the Brain and Tissue Bank for Developmental Disorders, hosted by the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Each year it distributes some 3,000 tissue samples to researchers, collected from donors (average age: 20 to 40 years old) with neurological disorders ranging from autism to Down syndrome to Parkinson's disease. The donors' cellular material will aid researchers looking for treatments for such diseases.

According to the bank's 234-page "Catalog of Available Tissue," updated July 1, it also stores tissue from hundreds of fetuses, including those with chromosomal disorders, anencephaly (a brain malformation)—and many with no disorders at all, marked as "control" tissue and spanning ages 10 to 39 weeks.


