I want to point you all to a landmark California Supreme Court case that we can view in light of our discussion of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cell lines. In this well-known case, a man (John Moore) went to UCLA for leukemia treatment and parts of his cancer were eventually developed into a commercial cell line. Though Moore sued, the California Supreme Court ruled that he had no entitlement to the profits generated by his body samples:
Wikipedia article
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What I'm not quite sure I understand about these cases is if there is a contract before 'donating' or 'discarding' your tissue/body matter to a hospital that states that you give up the right to your cell profit. If so, I don't think that the hospitals or scientist should be blamed. If not, perhaps it is a method that should be adopted. Nowadays, it seems that you have to sign contracts for everything, from insurance to itunes. I'm not sure why cell culturing would be different. Maybe I am missing a major point.
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