Golde and Dr. Quan “inventors of the cell line” and the Regents the “assignee.” They would “share in any royalties or profits.”
Biotechnology experts predicted a three-billion-dollar market for lymphokines by 1990.
(More and more I trust in the bare facts of things, even if such facts are hard to gather and get clear. I want to grasp the facts of this, what happened. I want to let those facts—not my wonderings about them—speak.)
When he learned of the patent, Moore filed suit, accusing the doctors and university of interfering with his “ownership” and “right of possession.” He claimed a proprietary interest in any “products the defendants might create from his cells or patented cell line.”
(Strange how the body becomes a thing that’s owned, co-owned, disputed. How it’s one’s own but not—a generator of profits. Legalized, fought over, shared, unshared. What does it mean to be “oneself”?)
In 1990, the California Supreme Court ruled against John Moore.
Dr. Golde had, by that time, “negotiated agreements for commercial development of the cell line and products derived from it.” He would be paid in exchange for “exclusive access to the materials and research performed.”
(There’s a silence in John Moore I can’t get hold of. Not the part of him that sued, but that place within him where he came to know his cells were taken, grown, changed and sold by others and all the while he hadn’t known it. Unlike me, had he been asked, he could have decided yes or no.)
The court ruled human cell lines patentable because “long-term adaptation and growth of human tissues and cells in culture is difficult—often considered an art.” (And yet they were his cells.) Therefore, the cell line is a “product of invention” not a “raw material” of nature.
John Moore asked, how could he not own his genetic material? How could it belong to someone else?
(When you made me did you feel you owned me? Did you think of me as your invention?.)
Justice Arabian wrote on behalf of the majority, “The plaintiff has asked us to recognize and enforce a right to sell one’s own body for profit. He entreats us to regard the human vessel, the single most venerated and protected subject in any civilized society as equal with the basest commercial commodity. He urges us to commingle the sacred with the profane. He asks much.”
(Yet it was the others who were profiting and selling. What would have happened if John Moore had sued to have his cells not sold at all, no profits made from them for him or anyone?)
Justice Arabian continued, “The majority view is not unmindful of the seeming injustice in a result that denies the plaintiff a claim for conversion of his body tissue, yet permits defendants to retain the fruits thereof.”
(Sometimes it seems the same questions continually arise in different guises: What’s privacy, ownership, slavery, freedom, what’s choice? What can be commodified, what not?
I don’t know what became of John Moore. I don’t know if he’s even alive.
Such an ordinary night, this night. I look out on the stone face across the way, stoplight flashing, slow line of passing cars. Familiar sounds, background sounds. Then I think, what’s ordinary? There’s so much that’s strange within a single, ordinary day—look at what happened to John Moore, the otherness his body became without his even knowing. When the ordinary starts to seem frightening, what then? Or has it always been frightening and I just hadn’t noticed, hadn’t thought of it that way?)
Notes on Stelarc
He believed the human body as we know it is obsolete—distraught, overwhelmed by information and sensory data, inefficient.
His body was his exhibition space. He performed his ideas in Japan, Australia, Europe, North America.
He sought to “rupture the body’s surface,” examining it as an “extendable evolutionary structure enhanced by the most disparate technologies.”
(My body is something I hide, or try to.)
He wired himself with electrodes and transducers in order to allow Internet data to be transmitted into him and activate his movements.
For his performance FRACTAL FLESH he developed a touch-screen Muscle Stimulation System which enabled remote access and actuation of a human body. “A movement that you initiate in Melbourne can be displaced and manifested in another body in Rotterdam.”
(Even as I hide, the world comes into me and through me, as once your laboratory instruments probed beneath my skin. Radio waves, subliminal messages, electronic and mechanical vibrations, toxins, chemical pollutants—such fragile boundaries between a body and the world. Or are there any boundaries at all?)
“The usual relationship with the Internet is flipped—instead of