Even if there is no legal or ethical obligation to pay donors for their tissues, the physician-investigatorss in this case were strongly motivated to share the potential financial gains with the patient's surviving family. Much like Christoph Lengauer, their intuition was that, if the cell lines proved lucrative, the patient or surviving family should receive some financial recognition of his contribution. Would it be permissible for them to give the family a monetary gift? By definition, such a gift would not be something that the investigators “owed” the patient or something the patient “deserved,” but rather would serve as an expression of the investigators' gratitude.
