Believing our bodies are our own is so basic we hardly think about it - unless circumstances intervene, as they did when a man called John Moore went into hospital for an operation on his spleen. After lengthy court battles, Moore lost his case. His body, or part of it, was ruled to belong to someone else.
Moore's landmark case in the Californian courts was the ghost at the feast when President Bill Clinton stood with public and private representatives of the diverse Human Genome Projects this week to announce the discovery of the human genetic alphabet, composed of some 3,000 million chemical letters. In London Tony Blair made a co-ordinated announcement. In Ireland, it was pushed down the news agenda because of the extraordinary political events we are, shall we say, enduring.
Yet it is precisely in such states that the human genetic project is at risk of abuse. Here your body is not absolutely yours. Ireland already operates a constitutional denial of the body's absolute physical integrity, namely the amendment equating a woman's right to life with that of any pregnancy she develops, no matter how immature. On that basis alone, Irish law is predisposed towards the legal and ethical arguments that led to the Moore decision.
Moore's case looked simple. Dr David Goldie extracted Moore's blood protein from one of his cell lines, and patented the results. Moore argued that Dr Goldie's act was tantamount to stealing in criminal law. But Dr Goldie won the case. The Californian Supreme Court ruled that you do not own bodily material removed from you and that doctors, nurses or researchers who remove it with broad permission may then own that material themselves. Dr Goldie, the court decided, was entitled to profit from the patent he went on to make. Moore was not.
Moore faced a further theoretical difficulty under US law because of the absence there of a national health service. Had he needed access to Dr Goldie's patent, the one made from his own bodily materials, he could have done so only if he was able to afford the costs. His right to his own body, and his right to treatment, were restricted.
YOU cannot be too sensational in describing the human genome project's implications. The news is on the same scale as the invention of the wheel, the printing press or digital technology, possibly higher.
For good, the information could relieve or cure awful conditions such as cystic fibrosis, testicular and ovarian cancer, haemophilia. For ill, it could make gene therapy to the ordinary person what Sorrento Terrace is to the first-time buyer, as well as making workplaces less likely to welcome those with genetically determinable conditions.
What matters most, however, is that science has looked up into the skies and found that it may be able to occupy the place that used to be assigned to God. That sort of power is awesome. If a unifying myth emerges from the new biology, as some scientists hope, then science will become the religion of the future. The question is whether that new religion will in fact serve ordinary mortals any better, or more equitably, than the old religion did.
Signs are it may not. Looking to cases such as the Moore case offers a glimpse of what could become widespread in the future. The worst implication of the Californian courts' decision was that it promoted the concept of the human body as a kind of genetic real estate, to be farmed or speculated upon by others, for whatever reason.
But if a man does not own his own body, then who does? The parallel to the Irish situation grows. In Ireland, a pregnant woman - let's call her Murphy - may not take decisions about her body and put them into effect within her own community, however immature the pregnancy, largely because of the way the "old" religion has infiltrated legal thinking, making her body subject to a "higher" court of appeal.
In the US, a man like Moore is restricted in the decisions he may take about his body, largely for reasons of the "new" religion's belief in profit, and in science's overriding right of access to the individual human body in pursuit of its own higher ends.
Whatever the motive, both Moore and Murphy become human real estate, with restricted power and rights to their own bodies. The ensuing conflict spells trouble. Much as Clinton and Blair appeared to reassure ordinary people that their well-being would take first place in the brave new world, a barrage of economic and sectarian legislation combines to make that reassurance a lot less reliable than it seems.
There are, of course, very different historical reasons why the Moore and Murphy situations could develop. Following on Moore, the US Patents Office decided that human body parts could be patented in the same way as mechanical inventions. That attitude was supported notably by existing patent law. This remains the line of interpretation dominant in EU law.
When applied to the considerably more complex ethical and legal issues of the information age, those concepts are out of date. But many vested interests stand to gain if nothing changes. Private companies can and are registering gene sequences, which reduces humanity to a set of information fragments, capable of being owned in the same way as other bits of information technology.
This is the context in which the belief that Ireland need not worry must be challenged. Existing law makes it more likely for individual rights to be overridden here than in other jurisdictions. Murphy's dilemma goes far beyond the question of which side you take in the abortion debate. For so long as her rights are limited, we might as well all call ourselves Moore.
mruane@irish-times.ie