Media and Public debates over Moore employ unstable definitions of human, the body, bioslavery, and altruism.

These definitions both displace a structural understanding of the biocolonialism inherent in tissue donation and ensure any legal reforms over tissue donation fail and
remain trapped in biocolonialism.
Wald 05
[Priscilla Professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University, published widely on the
intersections of science, medicine, law, and literature, B.A. in English from Yale University (class of
1980) and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Columbia University (1981, 1987). Whats in a Cell?:
John Moores Spleen and the Language of Bioslavery New Literary History, Volume 36, Number 2,
Spring 2005, pp. 205-225] [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nlh/summary/v036/36.2wald.html]
Presumably, Macks waste products had no social or scientific value beyond his fantasies, and therein
lies the difference. Unusual immunological properties made John Moores cells scientifically valuable,
and the pharmaceutical industry put a dollar amount in the neighborhood of three billion on the patent
for a cell line derived from John Moores cells. Those circumstances marked the distinction between
John Moores discarded spleen and the contents of Harrison Macks pickle jars. They have been the
subject of considerable debate in the legal, medical, scientific, business, and bioethics communities.
And the issues have found their way into the mainstream media as well. The courts, as James Boyle
points out, witnessed considerable confusion surrounding the issues of the Moore case; the newness of
the technology and procedures involved made it difficult to explain exactly what the issues were.5 In
the end, Moore was primarily about patent law; the main questions concerned whether the spleen, the
blood, the cells, and the information they contained were property, and, if so, whose property they
were: who had a right to profit from the sale of the cell line derived from those cells? Posed by
journalists as well as legal experts, those questions registered an awareness that advances in
biotechnology were changing conceptions about the nature of human being and a conviction that those
changes carried grave risks.6 Lawyers attempt to make sense of new situations through legal
precedents. In the process of making conceptual changes subject to legal control, that is, they look for a
past ruling that will help them convincingly and authoritatively resolve present and future cases. Thus
they create historical narrativesstories about the pastwith explanatory as well as predictive power.
Those narratives, of course, also change the terms through which the concept is understood; they are, in
that sense, transformative. And lawyers are not the only such storytellers. Inevitably, faced with the
unfamiliar, individuals and groups fashion sense-making accounts. These accounts are especially
evident in the media and in popular fiction and films, which widely disseminate the terms through
which legal and political discussions make sense of new concepts and which offer scenarios that play
out their implications and consequences. Through a variety of media, the transformation of legal
precedents into historical narratives shapes popular as well as legal perceptions of the changes
attendant upon biotechnology. In the case of John Moores spleen, the most dramatic recasting of the
dilemma summoned the threat of enslavement. On both sides of the case, legal experts and cultural
observers cautioned that ownership of a human body was the first step on the slippery slope to
bioslavery. The powerful image of a human being defined as chattel and legally owned by another
human being is not unique to the Moore case and the issue of cell lines, but has also been invoked as a
dangerous consequence of the hypothetical engineering of protohuman beings through transgenic
experimentation. The threat of enslavement is potent across cultures, with a resonance that is
influenced by the historical experience of the institution in a given culture. It registers the power of one
group to define the relationship of another group to the legal conventions of property and personhood
to control their bodies and define them as a group in which that control is embeddedand it can be
used effectively as a political critique. But it can also recast the nature of the problems raised by
biotechnology in ways that deflect a more incisive and appropriate set of criticisms. Bioslavery has
become one of the most common scenarios in popular accounts of the genome sciences, especially in

fiction and film, and in many of these cases it runs the risk of distorting public perceptions of the
science and obscuring important ethical concerns. Invoking bioslavery as a threat of biotechnology is
certainly not exclusive to the United States, but it appears to be more common in U.S. legal and media
debates as well as in popular cultural depictions. In the United States, slavery is one of the two most
shameful chapters of national history (along with native genocide), as well as the most significant
threat to national unity. With the Civil War Amendments (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth), the
nations leaders sought to make it impossible in the United States for one group of people to have the
power to define another group of people as property and sought also to make national citizenship
available to any person born within the United States (or to a U.S. citizen abroad). In the wake of
Moore, legal and policy analysts summoned the Civil War Amendmentsespecially the Thirteenthto
represent the danger of patenting any aspect of the human body. The logic of that strategy was to refuse
the concept of ownership by linking it to the legally sanctioned practice of slavery. The invocation of
the Civil War Amendments, however, obscures important categorical distinctions between chattel
slavery and patent law with semantics: the term ownership.7 In the process, it creates the terms that
make sense of the biotechnological developments: the Civil War Amendments offer a national
backdrop for imagining the consequences of biotechnology, from the transformation of the human body
to the implications of the commercialization of human body parts. In legal discussions, newspapers,
popular fiction, and film, the Civil War Amendments and the language of bioslavery have reframed
unresolved questions concerning genetic definition and patent law in the familiar language of human
liberty and national citizenship. Analysis of the representation of biotechnology in popular media offers
insight into how the narratives generated around the science affect not only the publics understanding
of the science, but also the identification and shaping of the social, legal, religioethical, and policy
issues. The Slippery Slope When surgeons at UCLA Medical Center removed Moores severely
swollen spleen in 1976, as part of his treatment for hairy cell leukemia, they were puzzled that his
blood profile returned to normal. Upon examination, a UCLA medical researcher, Dr. David Golde,
discovered that Moores cells contained unusual medical properties that stimulated the immune system
and had helped Moore fight his frequently fatal disease. Golde and his research associate, Dr. Shirley
Quan, isolated and cultivated Moores cells until there was a sufficient number to be considered a stable
population that could be used for a variety of research purposes: they created an immortal cell line. In
1984 the Regents of the University of California patented the Mo cell line, ostensibly invented by
Golde and Quan and named for John Moore. Growing suspicious about the real nature of his
semiannual required trips to the UCLA Medical Center to have his blood drawn, as well as for other
procedures, Moore questioned Golde about the purpose of these visits. When no satisfactory answer
was forthcoming, he hired a lawyer. That was when he discovered the unusual properties of his blood
and the nature of Goldes research. It was also when he discovered the profit that Golde, Quan, and
UCLA were making on his cells. Moore had never consented to the creation of a cell line, and he had
received no share of the profits from its sale. The courts and journalists quickly recognized the
magnitude of the case. As one journalist put it, the courts decision may expand patients rights, add a
dimension to the controversy over the use of fetal tissue in research, provide a further piece of the
puzzle in the ownership of eggs and sperm, and even put a new wrinkle in the abortion issue.8 Words
like altruism, selfishness, profit motive, and human dignity mingled, as lawyers, ethicists,
policy makers, and journalists debated the implications for medical research, business, law, ethics, and
public policy. Scientists worried that such claims, if legitimized, would impede research, and
pharmaceutical companies expressed concern that interference with the patent process would slow
down the development of important treatment regimes. Many ethicists, in turn, decried the violation of
human dignity represented by the nonconsensual use of Moores discarded body part.9 The one thing
on which everyone could agree was that scientific advances in the field of biotechnology and the
genome sciences were changing the conventional terms of human being. The lack of clarity in this case
underscores its importance: new contexts had created new entities and, consequently, the need for new

definitions. A discarded cancerous spleen was no longer simply a waste product, but what was it: a
valuable medical entity? a valuable financial investment (worthy of a patent)? a part of a human being?
And who should profit from the sale of a cell line derived from it: the person from whom it had been
extracted in a life-saving operation? the researchers who discovered the properties of the cells and
transformed them into the cell line? the medical center that made that research possible? the
pharmaceutical company that might metamorphose it again into a drug to treat cancer, AIDS, or other
diseases? Moores attorneys brought thirteen causes of action against a variety of defendants. The most
controversialand the one on which most of the others turnedwas conversion, the improper use of
someone elses possession. The majority of the Los Angeles County Superior Court ruled that the case
was not, in the end, about Moores personal property and that, therefore, there was no case. The Court
of Appeal overturned that ruling with the judgment that the essence of a property interest the
ultimate right of control . . . exists with regard to ones own human body.10 They therefore sent the
case back to trial court. But in the majority opinion, Rothman conceded the importance of approaching
that issue with caution, since the evolution of civilization from slavery to freedom, from regarding
people as chattels to recognition of the individual dignity of each person, necessitates prudence in
attributing the qualities of property to human tissue.11 Although he immediately insisted on the
dramatic difference between having property rights in ones own body and being the property of
another, the statement nonetheless registered some of the key issues and anxieties of the case as it
made its way both through the courts and through the popular press.12 The issue was whether John
Moore had a regulatory or proprietary right to a product created from the information in his discarded
cells. A patent marks the right to control access to an invented product or procedure for a specified
amount of time. Slavery changed the terms of the debate as it established a particular historical
context for the Moore case. For Moore to profit from the patent on the information contained in the Mo
cell line, his cells (and the information in them) would have to be his property, but ownership in
ones person, for some, summoned the demons of the national past, threatening the evolution of
civilization.13 For others, it was common sense that, as one science writer opined, [i]f anything is
truly personal, uniquely ours, its our genetic code.14 They were speaking in different registers:
Moore could be viewed as asking to commodify his own body part or seen as the victim of the theft of
his most private and inalienable information. It depended on the framing of the account. Following a
year and a half of deliberation, the California Supreme Court once again ruled against Moores
conversion claim, although they did find that the physician had not discharged his disclosure
obligations: Moore had not been properly informed about the use of his body parts, and for that the
doctors involved in the case deserved censure, but Moore was not entitled to share in the profit from
their research. In the end, complains legal scholar Michelle Bourianoff Bray, the courts exacerbated
the controversy over the extent of individuals interests in their own bodies by expressing a
cacophony of views through dissenting and concurring opinions and disposing of the case on public
policy grounds.15 One justice, concurring with the majority, chose to file a separate opinion, in order,
he explains, to give voice to a concern that . . . informs much of that opinion but finds little or no
expression therein. . . . Plaintiff has asked us to recognize and enforce a right to sell ones own body
tissue for profit. He entreats us to regard the human vesselthe single most venerated and protected
subject in any civilized societyas equal with the basest commercial commodity. He urges us to
commingle the sacred with the profane. He asks much.16 In this view, Moore, rather than the UCLA
researchers, was asking that his body be commodified, and the problem stemmed not from the
patenting of the cell line, which was thereby assumed to be property, but from its definition as part of
Moores body and therefore his property. Responding to the decision of the Court of Appeal, ethicist
Arthur Caplan noted that the most staggering implication of the case was the fact that for the first
time in the history of Anglo-American law, somebody has declared your own body to be property.17
The response shows the importance of definitions. Moores conversion argument turned on the
definition of his cells as his property. More dramatically, the judges and Caplan, among others,

believed that such a definition could have enormous human-rights implications: defining his cells as his
property could be the first step to reintroducing slavery. In the pages of the Christian Science Monitor,
Future Shock author Alvin Toffler conjured John Moore and a variety of other subjects of the
biotechnological revolution to spell out the danger of the definitional instabilities produced by
scientific advances. He lamented that it was now possible, in principle, to transfer human traits into
animals and animal traits into humans. If we do this, or create new life forms with genes drawn from
humans, we can, also in principle, reach a point at which the common (mainly implicit) definition of
humanness becomes blurred. What traits ultimately define a human? Where is the borderline of
humanness?18 A South African woman who at the time Tofflers 1987 piece appeared was carrying
her daughters fertilized ova, was technically pregnant, he notes, with her own grandchildren. Toffler
bemoans the loss of the once reasonably clear and distinguishable categories of child, grandchild,
or mother and of the moral and legal responsibilities that accompanied those categories. Of
Moore, he asks, [T]o whom do the parts of ones body belong? Before excision? After? Putting
conventional and legal definitions at the center of his inquiry, Toffler wonders what will happen to the
category of murder as science changes the definitions of death and life. And he asks ominously,
if we do not know how to define human, what about human rights? (21). Toffler confuses a
mainly implicit definition of humanness with a stable (unchanging) one when he expresses his
concern that biotechnological and especially genomic research will destabilize the term. Categories
such as human rights, murder, and even child certainly depend on conventional definitions, and
biotechnological developments can indeed change them. As scientific research puts some widely held
beliefs in question, it is not unusual to hear the argument that it is confounding the idea of humanness.
But there has never been a universal definition of human being. The definitions of what, socially as
well as biologically, actually constitutes a human beingof human rights and of where life begins, to
take two examplesremain, as they always have been, unresolved and troubling questions. Tofflers
reasoning exemplifies the logicand the slippageof the legal argument. Enslavement is one of the
most egregious examples of the dangers of that conventionality. Anticipating the language of the Court
of Appeal, Toffler worries that biotechnology will alter the stable definition of human being and
therefore lead to the worst of slippery slopes: Slave labor is not slavery if the slaves are not human,
he warns. If we can sell parts of our cells . . . why not the entire body? And if body parts can be sold
separately, why not the wholefor 21st-century bioslavery (21). But while biotechnological
developments may call attention to the conventionality, they do not create it. Bioslavery is a
remarkably imprecise term, but its appeal is both powerful and pervasive, and it circulates in a variety
of arenas. When the patentability of transgenic animals came before Congress, in the late 1980s, the
chairman of the subcommittee, Representative Robert Kastenmeier, summoned the Thirteenth
Amendment to express his concern about the blurring of genetic distinctions between human beings
and animals, and a 1990 patent act established that the grant of a . . . property right in a human being
is prohibited by the Constitution and that therefore a human being will not be considered to be
patentable subject matter.19 The patenting of life had come before the courts prior to Moore when, in
1980, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Ananda Chakrabartys right to apply for a patent for bacteria
that he had genetically engineered to eat oil. But Chakrabartys invention did not involve human
matter. The patenting of an invention produced through the manipulation of212 new literary history
human cells was clearly of another order. Characteristically, genetic manipulation of any sort involving
human beings was dogged by the historical memory of Nazi eugenics. Images of enslavement
summoned a national demon not linked historically to genetic manipulation. The concern here
crystallized not around the effect of genetic manipulation of human beings, but around the social
implications of a conceptual shift. In their efforts to negotiate the uncharted territory of biotechnology,
the genome sciences and their implications, legal and popular debates returned to the nations deepest
collective anxiety and its historical resolution. In the face of the unknown, national history, however
shameful, is also familiar. But that familiar and reliable narrative of national history also shapes the

experience of new technologies and the new ideas and concepts that they engender. The idea of
bioslavery represents not an intrinsic logic, but the creation of a logic. In the political, juridical, and
journalistic arenas, the definitional instability of the idea of human being prompts a turn to the
Thirteenth Amendment or the image of bioslavery. National identity surfaces to sharpen the contours of
a conceptually fuzzy human being. <card continues after discussing works of fiction
representations of biotechnology> The politics are cartoonish. Kevins lab and the surrounding
compound are built on the site of the Spanish colonial settlement of Cogo. The underdeveloped
postcolonial economy offers fertile ground for the project supported by an unsavory alliance of thugs
financed by the capital of a global corporate giant called GenSys. In the spatial logic of Chromosome 6,
the only language and authority through which the protagonists can respond are national. The novel
dramatizes the assumptions embedded in the phrase, the evolution of civilization from slavery to
freedom, with which the Court of Appeal issued its warning in Moore. The phrase suggests that the
law prohibiting slavery marks the evolution of the nation into a higher form of civilization. If, as
depicted in Chromosome 6, biotechnology poses the threat of bioslavery, then U.S. history, having with
the Thirteenth Amendment ostensibly resolved any future threat of slavery, offers the solution to a
threat posed by the misapplications of biotechnology in the hands of criminals motivated by anything
from an implied Nazism to corporate greed in lawless Africa. When U.S. national history is thus
superimposed on evolutionary history, bioslavery can actually justify U.S. imperialism: the need for
America to civilize the world through a careful supervision of scientific technology and
experimentation, medical applications (such as the global market for human body parts), and, generally,
human rights. This world isnt ready for a new race An immortal cell line is not a chimera, but they
share a definitional instability: an unclear relationship to human being and to commodity. For
Toffler, the danger of that instability is insurmountable, and he largely opposes biotechnology. For
others, such as legal theorist Michael Rivard, the problem of definitions should have a terminological
solution, and for that he turns to the law. Like Toffler, Rivard recognizes that transgenic
experimentation is complicating the (genetic) definition of human being. But where Toffler wants to
protect the presumed integrity of its meaning, Rivard recognizes its contingency: that the meaning of
the term depends upon nonconsensual definitions. The solution for him is to fashion a more inclusive
legal definition of personhood rather than to try to stabilize a biological concept of human being.
Looking into the future, Rivard imagines the possibility of a genetic engineering that erases, for
example, important biological distinctions between human beings and chimpanzees. Therefore, he
argues, to deny constitutional personhood to other intelligent species, who are like humans in relevant
ways, would be to engage in a form of interspecies racism. Unless one is prepared to sanction the
practice of prejudicial discrimination, one must consider extending personhood to other species.21 In
his search for a legal solution, Rivard does not stop with racism, but draws an analogy between
racism and human slavery (1468, emphasis added). The problem with his formulation emerges most
clearly when he invokes the Civil War Amendments. In the past, he writes, African-Americans were
legally enslaved and denied any constitutional rights on the basis of skin color. . . . By adopting The
Civil War Amendments, . . . which in part extended constitutional protections to the former slaves, . . .
Congress recognized that race is not a meaningful characteristic by which to differentiate constitutional
persons from nonpersons. . . . Arguments against racism, discrimination within a species, apply equally
well to genetic discrimination between species, or speciesism (146869). In Chromosome 6, one of
the New Yorkers, an African American, draws the same analogy when he first hears the story of the
bonobos. This world isnt ready for a new race, he observes. Weve got enough trouble with what
we have already (431). The analogy occludes two important distinctions. While racism involves the
misuse of science to justify oppression and other inequities and injustice, speciesism, in this context,
presumes the use of science to create a new biological entity (a creature) for which there is no social
precedent. It is premised on a biotechnological manipulation. Even more troubling is the conflation of
racism and human slavery and the claim that the Civil War Amendments addressed the former. The

Thirteenth Amendment prohibits slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment establishes national
citizenship. Race could no longer be a criterion on which human beings could be enslaved or denied
citizenship. However, the Civil War Amendments do not directly addressor prohibitall
manifestations of racism, the devaluing of human beings on the basis of presumed biological
differences. And subsequent national legislation (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) actually sanctioned the
segregation of people according to race. The analogy between speciesism and racism turns on one
groups power to decide the fate of another group and to justify that power through taxonomy: the
power, that is, to define not only legal personhood, but also biological human being. But the analogy
shades all too easily into an allegory, and from there into an equation, and the important distinctions
among slavery, racism, and speciesism are obscured in the process. The turn to the Civil War
Amendments imagines America as post-racist and American ideals, therefore, as the best way of
addressing speciesism and the definitional problem it entails. The faulty logic of the analogy is
dramatized in Tim Burtons remake of Franklin J. Schaffners 1967 Planet of the Apes. The human
beings metaphorical role-switch with the bonobos in Chromosome 6 is literally enacted in both
versions of the film when an astronaut who has traveled through time and space lands on a planet on
which human beings and primates have traded places. In both films, human viewers watch human
beings shot, beaten, and rounded up with nets by primates on horseback, as well as caged, probed, and
sold as pets or domestic servants without regard for family relations: familiar features of enslavement.
And the films turn on the efforts of the human protagonists Astronaut Taylor (Charleton Heston) in
Schaffners film and Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) in Burtonsto liberate their species
from their primate oppressors. For Schaffner, the role-switch is the result of nuclear war, but at the
beginning of the twenty-first century Burton found in it the perfect vehicle to explore the dangers of
transgenic experimentation: the training of genetically engineered primates for space exploration is part
of the protocol of the ship that crashes on the uninhabited planet. The national turn comes at the end of
both films. In Schaffners iconic ending, an apparently triumphant Heston comes upon the upper half of
the Statue of Liberty and must acknowledge that the alien planet is in fact Earth, which has been
devastated by nuclear conflict. The film ends with his raging against the human aggression that has
resulted in the failed promise of America and turned the conflated nation/planet unrecognizable. The
global conflict that destroys the world marks the failure to live up to the American ideals of national
inclusion represented by the Statue of Liberty. Throughout the film, Hestons character (jeremiadically)
speaks for that promise, affirming those values and establishing the violence as intrinsically unAmerican.22 Burton casts the threat to human identity in even more distinctly national terms, with his
revised ending. Wahlbergs character is more of a leader of troops than Hestons lone gunman, and he
fights a clear enemy in the evil primate General Thade, the direct descendant of the genetically
enhanced primate who evolved and led the revolt against the human beings who were stranded on the
uninhabited planet. Wahlbergs character effects a human/primate peace accord and heads home,
leaving General Thade trapped and dying on the planet. Or so he thinks. He is dismayed when he lands
on Earth at the base of a transformed Lincoln Memorial, Burtons wink to Schaffners iconic ending.
For the monument bears the features not of Honest Abe, the Great Emancipator, but of General Thade,
Emancipator of the Apes. While Kevin Marshall believes he brings the past into the present in
Chromosome 6, General Thade brings the future to the past in The Planet of the Apes and transforms
human history. From what I have been arguing, it is perhaps not surprising that a film that begins with
transgenic experimentation ends with an undoing of the legacy of the Civil War. Wahlbergs character
knows that he cannot count on primate justice. At first glance, the ending seems like a superficial spin
on Schaffners provocative conclusion. But the undoing of national history, as opposed to the
destruction of the future, marks an important distinction between the anxiety that attends genomic
research and a nuclear threat. Kevin Marshall had been uneasy about what his bonobo double might tell
him about himself. The genome sciences make it possible for people to returnliterallyto a
transformed past, to learn from their DNA, for example, that they are not who they thought they were:

that they are not the children of their presumed biological parents, perhaps, or that they do, or do not,
have biological ties to a particular racial or ethnic group. Or, for that matter, that an entire groups
presumed biological affiliations are different from what they had traditionally believed. Population
genomics offers the promise of new insight into human history, of the opportunity to chronicle the
migrations of peoples with unprecedented accuracy. But such discoveries unsettle familiar assumptions,
including the categories of identification through which human beings experience the world or the
reliability of the histories through which they know it. Those disruptions can be wonderfully
productive, but it is important to understand the context in which they take place. The nightmarishly
altered past of the Burton film captures the sense of uncanniness produced when new information
challenges the sense of belongingand of selfthat derives from ones beliefs about the past.
Wahlbergs character literally enters a world in which human being no longer means what he had
learned to assume that it meant. The trajectory of Burtons film leads from transgenic experimentation
to the transformation of national history: the challenge to human being reframed in national terms. This
reframing is more than a displacement. National history, like human history, is a story of belonging.
Although national history is explicitly premised on the terms of the law, while human history is
ostensibly biological, they are interanimated, and changes in human history will surely cast at least a
ripple through national history. Burtons ending imagines something more like a seismic shift. Genomic
information is not transformative until it comes into a social and rhetorical context. In their own ways,
Toffler, Rivard, and the jurists in the Moore cases understood that, which is why they put definitions at
the center of their arguments. But when they turned to the legal and historical precedents implied by
bioslavery, they engaged in a version of the genomic time travel in Cooks novel and Burtons film:
they changed the terms of the dilemma they were confronting. In some sense, the shift is the definition
of a precedent: putting a new problem in the context of a familiar solution. But, as I have been arguing,
bioslavery does not sufficiently address the problems raised by either Moore or transgenic
experimentation. It is too easily dismissed as a concern: patenting a cell line does not imply the
ownershipor potential enslavementof Moores body. It therefore does not adequately explain
Moores relation to the Mo cell line, and it frames the conventionality of human being as a problem for
which national identity is the solution. Rivards concern that biotechnological research could confound
distinctions among species is well founded. And to the extent that the analogy between racism and
speciesism points to the intrinsic conventionality of biological classifications, it is suggestive. But,
ironically, his move to the Civil War Amendmentsthe move to a legal and historical precedenttakes
his argument out of history. Stuart Hall cautions against extrapolating a common and universal
structure to racism which obscures how thoroughly racism is reorganized and rearticulated with the
relations of new modes of production.23 In the examples I have offered, bioslavery and the Civil War
Amendments consistently fail to address the specificity of the articulation of biotechnological change
in the institutions in which inequities are embedded. It is not enough to contend, for exampleas many
prominent population geneticists do that the genetic chronicling of populations that do not conform
neatly to races will once and for all make racism obsolete.24 The claim reduces a social dynamic to a
biological misunderstanding and fails to consider how biology is articulated within social institutions
through narratives that can shift to incorporate new formulations into familiar hierarchical structures.
The nation is an important site at which those narratives are produced. The horror registered on
Wahlbergs face at the end of The Planet of the Apes marks his characters recognition that he has no
access to the law and no place in the nation: in primate society, he is utterly disenfranchised and
without rights. But an ironicand probably unwittingtwist involving Burtons iconography
dramatizes the structural power of (unacknowledged) racism. The image of Aped Lincoln summons the
racist propaganda from the antebellum period in which both black and white abolitionists and
sympathizers were similarly depicted as primates, an image reproduced in enough history textbooks to
be at least subliminally evocative. In Burtons film, as in the original, with human atrocities and human
hubris comfortably in the past (and offstage), black characters are killed off relatively early, leaving

white Americans to emerge as the heroic champions of individual rights and liberties against primitive,
closed-minded, repressive apes (reminiscent of Cooks Equatoguineans). The visual iconography of the
film marks the uncanny return of the racism that Rivards analogy has repressed. A critique of
bioslavery, in other words, is not necessarily a critique of racism. John Moore died in 2001. He spent
the last decade of his life advocating for patients rights in the area of biotechnology and patent law. He
was hailed in particular by activists involved in environmental justice, indigenous rights, and
biocolonial movements. For Debra Harry, executive director of the Indigenous Peoples Council on
Biocolonialism, the Moore casewhich concerned the definition and ownership of a white mans
spleenhad much to teach the world about racism, identity, and power. Moores unempowerment
made him available for what she dubs bio-prospecting, the exploitation of raw resources that she
believes is being systematically imposed on indigenous peoples, whose genes, like Moores, frequently
have properties that make them interesting to the medical establishment.25 Moore did not live alone in
the land of biotechnological chimeras. He was joined by, among others, a Hagahai man from Papua,
New Guinea and a Guayami woman from Panama. Indigenous peoples are more likely to be subjected
to this biocolonialism because of efforts within genomic research to collect and study the DNA of
indigenous groups. The problem is not an intrinsic racism of genomics, Harry explains, but the
inequitable system and cultural biases in which genomic research takes place and genomic information
is interpreted and used. Preceding all of these cases, however, was that of Henrietta Lacks, an African
American woman who was being treated for a virulent malig-222 new literary history nancy at the
Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s when she unwittingly donated the first cells to be immortalized as
a cell line. While the HeLa cell line was not patented, it has been a widely used and extremely lucrative
entity. Lacks died without knowing her contribution to science, and her family, despite their own
(initially unwitting) contribution, has not shared in the profit. These cases underscore unresolved social
issues that surfacelike the unresolved definition of human beingin the Moore case: the
discrepancy between who participates in scientific research and who benefits from it. Patients and their
families have been enlisted in genomic research as partners only to discover that they cannot afford
the tests or treatments developed from research initiatives in which they participated. Nor do the
inhabitants of the rainforests have access to the drugs developed from the plants of their environment
or, as James Boyle points out, the wisdom of their shamans. He notes in particular the irony that the
drug produced from the rosy periwinkle of Madagascar would have yielded profits equal to or higher
than any other single source of the nations incomeif the nation had shared in the profits.26
Bioslavery does not address these issues, which entail the distribution and exploitation of resources and
the inequities of access to health care. The danger of biotechnology is not, as popular culture typically
depicts it, that scientists will produce something that will enslave us. Rather, biotechnological
developments disclose issues (such as the definition of human being or the unequal distribution of
resources) that have never been resolved. With this resurfacing comes the opportunity to look anew at
structural inequities: local, national, and global. Biotechnology is revealing those inequities, and in
some cases exacerbating them, but the terms through which the argument is presented frequently
obscure the source of the problem. Biocolonialism offers a more encompassing analysis of the social
and economic inequities and can offer an important framework within which to understandand
potentially addressthe dangers of biotechnological research. It is important to remember the lesson of
the Thirteenth Amendment: that there was a time in U.S. history that made it necessary to legislate the
prohibition of the practice of enslavement. And the practices and products of biotechnology certainly
call for the development of new legislation and policies. But those developments must include careful
attention to the language, images, and narratives through which the changes are described and the
problems understood. John Moores legacy is important. To biomedical researchers, he left the Mo cell
line (since renamed RLC), but his story is also a legacy. It reminds us that scientific research is not
conducted independently of the narratives of history and the practices of contemporary society, and that
it neither causes, nor resolves, the profound instability of the definition of human being.