What's in a cell?: John Moore's spleen and the language of bioslavery

New Literary History

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 205-225

  Wald, Priscilla ^a  

^a DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 38949091533     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2005.0038     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. John Barth, The Floating Opera (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 87.
2. Ellen Goodman, "Body Parts and Ownership Rights," St. Petersburg Times, July 29, 1988.
3. Moore v. Regents of the University of California, 215 Cal. App. 3d 709, 1988 Cal. App. LEXIS 666, 249 Cal. Rptr. 494, 503 (July 21, 1988).
4. Rothman is citing Venner v. State, 30 Nd. App. 599, 354 A.2d 483 (1976). Moore, 249 Cal. Rptr. at 505. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Ronald M. George calls "this dictum a weak foundation upon which to construct a property right in a patient's surgically-removed body tissue and fluid. "
5. James Boyle's extended discussion of Moore and the use of the Thirteenth Amendment and the idea of "transgenic slavery" has significantly influenced my treatment of this theme. I was, in fact, inspired to investigate this case by a talk Boyle gave at Duke University in the fall of 2000. See his Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
6. My analysis has also benefited from numerous conversations with Robert Mitchell and from his four essays that address the Moore case. See his "Owning Shit: Commodification and Body Wastes," Bad Subjects 55 (March 2001), http://eserver.org/bs/55
7. and the expanded version, "Sell: Body Wastes, Information, and Commodities," in Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information, ed. Robert Mitchell and Phillip Thurtle (New York: Routledge, 2004), 121-36;
8. also in progress by Mitchell are 'The Rhetorical Ecology of 'Dignity,' 'Waste,' and 'Information' in U.S. Tissue Economies," in Tissue Economies: Gifts, Commodities, and. Bio-Value in Late Capitalism, ed. Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell (under contract with Duke University Press), and an essay titled "Sacrifice and the Economics of Genomics." I have also found useful discussions in Paul Rabinow, "Severing the Ties: Fragmentation and Dignity in Late Modernity," in Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 146-50,
9. and John Frow, Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 152-79.
10. Robert Mitchell argues that these changes were less a function of biotechnological developments than of new policies, specifically the Bayh-Dole Act (35 USC 200-212), which encouraged collaboration between universities and businesses in biotechnological research and development and was thereby responsible for the kinds of commodification issues represented by Moore (Mitchell, 'The Rhetorical Ecology"). It is, however, also important to remember that the ongoing experimentation with human genetic material does produce (ongoing) definitional challenges.
11. J. E. Ferrell, "Whose Life Is It, Anyway?: Burgeoning Medical Technology Raises Questions About 'Property' Rights," St. Petersburg Times, February 4, 1990.
12. "Dignity" has not only been an important term in the popular discussion of this case, but it has also been the subject of academic discussions. See especially Paul Rabinow, "Life: Dignity and Value," in French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
13. and Robert Mitchell, "Sell: Body Wastes."
14. Moore, 249 Cal. Rptr. at 506.
15. Moore, 249 Cal. Rptr. at 504.
16. Moore, 249 Cal. Rptr. at 504.
17. Patent attorney Michael Gollin notes this irony in his contribution to the symposium, "Probing the Hunran Genome: Who Owns Genetic Information?" 4 B.U.J. SCI. & TECH. L. 2 (1997).
18. Ellen Goodman, "Who Reaps Medical Jackpot?" The Record, July 31, 1988.
19. Michelle Bourianoff Bray, "Personalizing Personality: Toward a Property Right in Human Beings," 69 Tex. L. Rev. 209, 234 (1990).
20. Justice J. Arabian, Concurring, Moore v. Regents of the University of California, Supreme Court of California, 51 Cal. 3d 120, 148 (1990).
21. Cited in Michael Spector, "Medical Community Rocked By Tissue-Ownership Battle: California Court Sides With Donor on Profits," Washington Post, January 8, 1989.
22. Alvin Toffler, "What Is Human Now?" Christian Science Monitor, June 4, 1987: 20-27, pp. 20-21. Subsequent references are to this piece.
23. H.R. Rep. No. 960, 101st Cong., 2d sess., pt. 1, at 21 (1990). Cited in Michael Rivard, "Toward a General Theory of Constitutional Personhood: A Theory of Constitutional Personhood for Transgenic Humanoid Species" 39 UCLA L. REV. 1425, 1439.
24. Robin Cook, Chromosome 6 (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1997), 26 (hereafter cited in text).
25. Rivard, 39 UCLA L. REV. 1425, 1467 (hereafter cited in text).
26. On the jeremiad as an American form, see Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
27. Stuart Hall, "Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance," in Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, ed. Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2002): 57.
28. On the problem of this argument, see my "Future Perfect: Genes, Grammar and Geography," New Literary History 31, no. 4 (2000): 681-708.
29. For Harry's discussion of Moore and of "bio-prospecting," see Debra Harry, "Patenting of Life and Its Implications For Indigenous Peoples," Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism, January 1995, http://www.ipcb.org/publications/briefing-papers/files/patents.html. Harry contends that "the colonizers, this time as well-funded and equipped 'bio-prospectors,' have their eyes on appropriating the natural resources of indigenous people to benefit those in the developed world.'"
30. Asking what consent means across diverse cultures, she advocates "a world-wide moratorium on the collection, databasing, manipulation, and commercialization of human cell lines and their genetic resources." This argument has been advanced in a variety of places in the past decade. See especially Vandaua Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston: South End, 1997). For a debate on this issue, see, also, Gollin, "Probing the Human Genome" (note 13).
31. And for a discussion of the danger of commercialization of human body parts, see especially Lori Andrews and Dorothy Nelkin, Body Bazaar: The Market For Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age (New York: Grown, 2001);
32. and Andrew Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop: The Engineering and Marketing of Life (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).
33. Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens, 128.