The symptoms crashed down like an avalanche, and John Moore didn't know what to think. Bruises all over his body, bleeding gums, and the roll of flesh around his waist that he'd always figured for fat had gotten lumpy and red and sore. He didn't know much about cancer, but when he finally dragged himself to a doctor in Anchorage in the summer of 1976, he learned more than he wanted to know. For one thing, he learned that he had it. For another, he found out his type was rare, something called hairy-cell leukemia. The doctor said it was attacking his spleen, so instead of absorbing aging blood cells the way a normal spleen does, his spleen was absorbing all his blood cells, cannibalizing him, swelling up in his gut and smashing his other organs against the walls of his body.

Who Owns This Body? WIL S. HYLTON Esquire v135, n6 (June, 2001):102. The U. S. patent code was never meant to cover your genes, your cells, your blood, or the marrow in your bones. But it does. And Craig Venter's map of the human genome was never meant to lead to the kind of great gene rush that is taking place as you read this. But it has. And the worst thing is, it's too late for you to do anything about it. You've already been sold. The symptoms crashed down like an avalanche, and John Moore didn't know what to think. Bruises all over his body, bleeding gums, and the roll of flesh around his waist that he'd always figured for fat had gotten lumpy and red and sore. He didn't know much about cancer, but when he finally dragged himself to a doctor in Anchorage in the summer of 1976, he learned more than he wanted to know. For one thing, he learned that he had it. For another, he found out his type was rare, something called hairy-cell leukemia. The doctor said it was attacking his spleen, so instead of absorbing aging blood cells the way a normal spleen does, his spleen was absorbing all his blood cells, cannibalizing him, swelling up in his gut and smashing his other organs against the walls of his body.