The problem of whether women should be involved in drug research is a question of who can assume risk and who is responsible for disseminating what specific kinds of information. The problem tends to be framed as one that juxtaposes the health of women and fetuses and sets their health as in opposition. That opposition, coupled with the inherent uncertainty in testing drugs, provides for a complex set of issues surrounding consent and access to information.
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.
The HeLa cell line was the first immortal human cell line that George Otto Gey, Margaret Gey, and Mary Kucibek first isolated from Henrietta Lacks and developed at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951. An immortal human cell line is a cluster of cells that continuously multiply on their own outside of the human from which they originated. Scientists use immortal human cell lines in their research to investigate how cells function in humans. Though the HeLa cell line has contributed to many advancements in biomedical research since the twentieth century, its usage in medical research has been controversial because Lacks did not consent to having her cells used for such purposes. As of 2020, scientists continue to use the HeLa cell line for numerous scientific advancements, such as the development of vaccines and the identification of many underlying disease mechanisms.
With over a century of culturally established associations for different musical sounds, the narrative properties of film scoring powerfully influence how societies and cultures perceive themselves through film. Film scoring in mainstream culture functions as a form of social practice in which consumers dictate the market that producers create for, while the ideas and philosophies portrayed in film shape consumer audiences’ perceptions of what their societies look like. A surge of discourse in the 21st century surrounds issues of representation and inclusivity in mainstream media, including what constitutes appropriation versus appreciation in film scores using non-Western music traditions. Recent postcolonial ethnomusicological theory demonstrates that collaboration and co-authorship are inclusive ways that can both avoid the pitfalls of colonialist power structures and also create autonomy for participating marginalized groups. My research examines four contemporary films of the 21st century--Kung Fu Panda 3, Moana, Black Panther, and The Breadwinner--and the collaborations between film composers and source musicians that establish cultural and racial musical narratives. I analyze various musical techniques these composers learned through the collaboration process with contributing source musicians and the resulting musical space each film’s soundtrack created for the representative demographic. This discourse opens other avenues of exploration into how mainstream media and the “global imagination” informs cultural music identities. I conclude my research with examples of film scores appearing outside cinema in social musicality; these examples demonstrate the impact that inclusivity in film scoring has on many areas of mainstream culture, especially in racial representation discourse.