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Volume 355:1517-1519 October 12, 2006 Number 15 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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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 . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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.

An interview with Professor Charo can be heard at www.nejm.org.

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• Andanda, P A (2008). Human-tissue-related inventions: ownership and intellectual property rights in international collaborative research in developing countries. J. Med. Ethics 34: 171-179 [Abstract] [Full Text]  
• Sebire, N.J., Dixon-Woods, M. (2007). Towards a new era of tissue-based diagnosis and research. Chronic Illness 3: 301-309 [Abstract]  
• Winickoff, D. E. (2007). Partnership in U.K. Biobank: A Third Way for Genomic Property?. J Law Med Ethics 35: 440-456  
• Cambon-Thomsen, A., Rial-Sebbag, E., Knoppers, B. M. (2007). Trends in ethical and legal frameworks for the use of human biobanks. Eur Respir J 30: 373-382 [Abstract] [Full Text]