On 9 July 1990, in Moore v. Regents of the University of California, the Supreme Court of California ruled in a four-to-three decision that individuals do not have rights to a share in profits earned from research performed on their bodily materials. In its decision, the Supreme Court of California ruled that cancer patient John L. Moore did not have personal property rights to samples or fluids that his physicians took from his body for research purposes. Moore created the precedent in California that although physicians are required to disclose their research interests to their patients, patients do not have property-related claims to any samples that their physicians take from their body. The Supreme Court of California’s decision in Moore v. Regents of the University of California enabled physicians and researchers to retain legal ownership on samples taken from their patients’ bodies so that they can conduct what the court describes as socially important medical research, such as work on reproductive cancers or developmental disorders.

From 1958 to 1961, Leonard Hayflick and Paul Moorhead in the US developed a way in the laboratory to cultivate strains of human cells with complete sets of chromosomes. Previously, scientists could not sustain cell cultures with cells that had two complete sets of chromosomes like normal human cells (diploid). As a result, scientists struggled to study human cell biology because there was not a reliable source of cells that represented diploid human cells. In their experiments, Hayflick and Moorhead created lasting strains of human cells that retained both complete sets of chromosomes. They then froze samples from the cultures so that the cells remained viable for future research. They also noted that cells could divide only a certain number of times before they degraded and died, a phenomenon later called the Hayflick limit. Hayflick and Moorhead’s experiment enabled research on developmental biology and vaccines that relied on human cell strains.

Published in 2002, prostate cancer researcher John R. Masters authored a review article HeLa Cells 50 Years On: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly that described the historical and contemporary context of the HeLa cell line in research in Nature Reviews Cancer. The HeLa cell line was one of the first documented immortal cell lines, isolated from cervical cancer patient Henrietta Lacks in 1951 at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. An immortal cell line is a cluster of cells that continuously multiply on their own outside of the original host. Though the HeLa cell line has contributed to many biomedical research advancements such as the polio vaccine, its usage in research has been controversial for many reasons, including that Lacks was a Black woman who did not knowingly donate her cells to science. In the article “HeLa Cells 50 Years On: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” Masters describes that, despite the benefits of the HeLa cell line, it has caused significant negative impacts on research due to its propensity to contaminate other cell lines, which can potentially invalidate research findings.