Body of Research — Ownership and Use of Human Tissue (N Engl J Med)

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"Perspective" piece from the New England Journal of Medicine
Volume 355:1517-1519 October 12, 2006 Number 15

Body of Research — Ownership and Use of Human Tissue

R. Alta Charo, J.D.

For better or worse, we have irretrievably entered an age that requires examination of our understanding of the legal rights and relationships in the human body and the human cell.

— Moore v. Regents of the University of California, California 2nd District Court of Appeals, 1988

Nearly 20 years after the California courts decided Moore v. Regents — a seminal case concerning a patient's interest in the profits derived from patents on a cell line generated from his spleen tissue — U.S. jurisprudence still has no coherent answer to a deceptively simple question: Do we own our own bodies?

Why deceptively simple? Because the meaning of "property" is unclear. Because the question must be asked about our relationships both to our bodies and to our excised body tissue. And because it must be asked about those relationships both before and after we die.

No brief article or single court opinion could address all the complexities of the legal notion of "property." But simple or not, the question of whether we "own" our bodies must be answered soon: courts now face multiple controversies concerning the use of bits and pieces of bodies — and their derivatives — that are scattered among pathology laboratories, state hygiene laboratories, museums, archives, sperm banks, fertility clinics, and forensic DNA collections. One recent controversy concerns William Catalona, a prostate cancer surgeon and researcher formerly employed by Washington University in St. Louis. Over the course of decades, and with his patients' consent, Catalona amassed more than 3500 tissue samples, developed the prostate-specific antigen test, and led clinical trials to improve testing for prostate cancer. When he left for another university, Catalona asked his patient-donors to write to Washington University requesting that their tissue samples be sent to his new place of employment. Washington University refused to send them, and a dispute arose about the patients' right to control the tissue.

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Source Information

Ms. Charo is a professor of law and bioethics at the School of Law and the School of Medicine, University of Wisconsin, Madison.


<more at the NE Journal of Medicine>

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/15/1517