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The Drowned Forest

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Kristopher Reisz

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“The pirogue Jean sat in was so close to the water he could hear it splash against the sides as it glided through the night. He reached out and let the cool and soft liquid brush along his hand, then let the drops that trembled at his fingertips drip into the Mississippi. He enjoyed this intimacy with the river, and it reminded him on his childhood where he and his brother Pierre spent days building boats and racing on the Garonne river near Bordeaux, sometimes even on the Bay of Biscay.”

“Our system was not set up to for the government to be able to do with a man's kingdom what they want. It was set up to protect that man's kingdom, to allow him to feel that his borders, no matter how great or small, would always be secure and that he would always be allowed to defend them. The Supreme Court took that right away with their eminent domain ruling back in 2005. The governments have taken advantage of that eminent domain ruling, and you, the media, have failed at protecting citizens.”

“Since the Common Rule says that research subjects must be allowed to withdraw from research at any time, these experts have told me that, in theory, the Lacks family might be able to withdraw HeLa cells from all research worldwide. And in fact, there are precedents for such a case, including one in which a woman successfully had her father’s DNA removed from a database in Iceland. Every researcher I’ve mentioned that idea to shudders at the thought of it.”

“The history of China’s “land reform” was written in the tears and blood of landowners like my great-grandfather. But the 300 million poor Chinese farmers were victims too. They gave the Communist Party their popular support, hoping to improve their living standards by taking property away from landowners. Instead, they became stepping stones for the Party to abolish private property rights once and for all.”

“Property breeds lawyers, I said, forbearing to add a belief that unfortunately property now seemed the only thing palpable enough to demand the respect of governments, and perhaps was the generating clout against encroachments on the spiritual protections for speech, assembly, and so on. It might turn out that without the right to possess we are not sure we really have the right to speak and to be.”

“many scientists have interfered with science in precisely the way courts always worried tissue donors might do. “It’s ironic,” she told me. “The Moore court’s concern was, if you give a person property rights in their tissues, it would slow down research because people might withhold access for money. But the Moore decision backfired—it just handed that commercial value to researchers.” According to Andrews and a dissenting California Supreme Court judge, the ruling didn’t prevent commercialization; it just took patients out of the equation and emboldened scientists to commodify tissues in increasing numbers. Andrews and many others have argued that this makes scientists less likely to share samples and results, which slows research; they also worry that it interferes with health-care delivery.”