Chapter OneA NEW LEASE ON LIFE: The Patent in American Medical
Culture How does it feel to be patented? There was a sense of
betrayal. I mean, they owned a part of me that I could never
recover. I certainly have no objection to scientific research .
. . but it was like a rape. In a sense, you've been violated,
for dollars. My genetic essence is held captive. -John Moore,
the subject of u.s. patent no. 4,438,032 In 1982, the mother of
Japanese biotechnology scientist Dr. Heideaki Hagiwara was
suffering from cervical cancer.1 When he learned that Dr. Ivor
Royston at the University of California at San Diego was
developing cell lines to treat cancer, he asked to join the
laboratory and, once there, convinced Royston to use tumor cells
from Hagiwara's mother's lymphatic system to create a
therapeutic cell line. A cell line is a community of cells,
usually animal or human, that grows continuously in the
laboratory, proliferating indefinitely under glass in precise,
artificially maintained conditions, where it is u