College of Law hosts ‘Who owns your body?’

The West Virginia University College of Law hosted a lecture Monday given by Dr. Michele Goodwin that asked students the question, "Who owns your body?"

The lecture, concerning law and medical research, was part of the College of Law's annual John W. Fisher II series.

Goodwin, a professor of medicine, public health and law at the University of Minnesota, focuses most of her research on transplants.

"Under what theories of law might we think about the question of who owns the body? It's a question that's not settled," Goodwin said. "We might think somewhere in the legislature there's an answer – a solid, universal answer in court – but no, not so much."

To highlight this idea, Goodwin talked to the audience about a famous case involving a man named John Moore, who was undergoing treatment for leukemia at the University of California Los Angeles Medical Center.

While undergoing treatment, Moore's doctor took specimens from him including biopsies of his spleen and semen samples.

Moore was unaware his doctor had made a partnership with a biotech company to develop a patent on his cell line, Goodwin said.

"When Moore sues, he has 13 causes of action, and he loses on all of them with the exception of one," she said. "The California Supreme Court did find that the doctors should have informed Moore of what they were doing, but on all of those other causes of action he loses."

Goodwin said this case got the court thinking about the concept of body ownership.

Goodwin discussed a 40-year study that took place at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where the patients did not have control over what happened to their bodies.

In the study, illiterate men with syphilis were tricked so their bodies could be more quickly autopsied and studied after death.

"They were told they were being treated for their syphilis and were being given antibiotics, but these men were just given sugar pills. This study went on even after we had discovered that penicillin could cure syphilis," she said. "Every year, they got a letter saying ‘great job for being in this study,' never knowing that it was really about seeing their bodies hasten and waste away."

Goodwin also presented the audience with pictures that were used as evidence of medical experimentation against Nazi officers in the Nuremberg trials.

"In the United States, while we know what is appropriate in terms of human engagement with medical research and medical science, we still, for forty years, continue with experimentation that is about hastening death," she said.

Goodwin said it is of the utmost importance that we revisit these moments in history to evaluate our current values involving human experimentation for the sake of scientific discovery.

Funding for the John W. Fisher II Lecture was provided by Dr. Thomas S. Clark, and his wife, Jean Clark.

The benefactors contributed $500,000 in 1998 to provide funding for lectures in 10 different fields throughout West Virginia.

WVU was able to secure one of these funded lectures, which was created to discuss important topics in law and medicine and was named in honor of John Fisher,II, the 15th dean of the College of Law.