Where your fat goes

[Gob]

Recycling tummy tuck by-products has become a big business. But do patients have a right to know where their unwanted fat ends up?

Last October, Rebecca Travers, a PhD student, got in her Renault and drove to a private hospital in Bath, England, known for its cosmetic surgery. Travers wasn't interested in having a tummy tuck. She wanted the fat that was left after the tuck was done. At the appointed time, and with the patient still sedated, the theatre staff produced the sample - abdominoplasty can result in quite large pieces of intact flesh and this weighed around 1kg. Travers placed it into her container - a metal tray in a plastic box - and then she drove back to Bath University to begin her analysis.

She was investigating adipose tissue - fat - and is part of a growing number of medical researchers and specialists who see in cosmetic surgery what many miss: the waste. Cosmetic surgery, after all, is all about removing excess fat and tissue. The mission of these experts is to rescue it from the incinerator.

"We don't have any figures," says Sian Harding, professor of cardiac pharmacology, Imperial College London, and one of the authors of the report "Human Bodies: donation for medicine and research", by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, "but it's a growth area and is driven by some very interesting developments."


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A whole industry has grown up around tissue collection. Firms have stepped in to open "bio banks" where human material is collected, stored in well-regulated freezers and sold. (PromoCell, the German-based company, for instance, charges around pounds 300-pounds 600 for a batch of adipose cells - not tissue - enough for several experiments.)


More here, possibly more than you want to know....

[dales]

Might I suggest a viewing of Fight Club to answer that question.