Chapter 23-28 Reviews on Human Genome Project

In 1973, researchers were trying to stop a HeLa contamination problem but in order to do that they would need samples of Henrietta’s DNA. Victor McKusick was one of the researchers and was also on staff at John Hopkins. He gave instructions to one of his assistants, Susan Hsu, to contact the Lacks’ family and see if they could take some blood samples. Day only having a third grade education didn’t understand what Susan Hsu was asking. All he heard was “They said they got my wife and she part alive. They said they been doin experiments on her and they wanted to come test my children see if they got that cancer killed their mother.” (Skloot,

The doctors were uncooperative with the Lacks family, the did not fully particularize the procedure that she underwent or the effect it would have on her. Furthermore, the healthcare professionals went drastically further in violations of her rights by taking a sample of her cancer without her permission numerous on numerous accounts. This is unacceptable practices conducted by the doctors. On the other hand, these cells became the groundwork for scientists to excel, luxuriating in breakthroughs achieved. The “Hela cells” contributed a variety of science fields from a vaccine for the polio virus, cloning, and gene mapping all comes through the use of her cells. Decades after her death the cells are still being used, her accomplishments in the field were relatively unknown till a student wrote this book. Henrietta Lacks never received the recognition for her helps in the achievement of the advancement of science, however, for a feat of this size one should receive glorification. For a student to have gone out of her way for someone they barely know, above all is unbelievably heart warming. This book shows us the unethical way that doctors practiced, but it turned out to better humanity, then left to examine this struggle to generate their own presupposition. The cells taken from her, furthermore, her family never received financial support. Consequently, this should not bother anyone at

The “The immortal life of Henrietta lacks” is a biography of all the events that happened surround the discovery, experimentation, and aftermath of the HeLa cells. This book goes in depth not only about the cells but the lacks family. In 1951 after her daughter Deborah was born Henrietta she talk to her cousins and some friends and described the feeling of “a knot” inside of her. Months after

When further research was done on her cancerous cells, without her family’s consent, they were found to be known as the “immortal cells” or HeLa cells. In addition to explaining her experience, Skloot explains how the discovery of the HeLa cell moved science forward greatly; for research for many treatments, human genetics, chromosomal disorders, and many diseases. A big portion of Skloot’s reason for writing this book was to explain Henrietta’s story. Her family is greatly involved in interviews while writing this book. Those family members include Deborah Lacks, her daughter, David Lacks, her cousin, and Lawrence Lacks, Henrietta’s older brother. In addition, Doctors George Gey who was the head of tissue cultures at John Hopkins and worked with HeLa cells and Howard Jones who had first examined Lacks’

This is where I began to notice the way that the Lacks family decided to cope with what life had handed to them. They were not people who had been well educated, nor did they care much for the science behind the immortality of Henrietta’s cells. They had boundless unanswered questions that they knew would probably stay unanswered forever. However, they believed strongly in one thing: God chose this for their family. “The idea that God chose Henrietta as an angel who would be reborn as immortal cells made a lot more sense to them than the explanation” that science had to give (Skloot

Also, while the doctors were making money off of Henrietta’s cells the family was struggling to get by and received no compensation. The Lacks’ family are African-American, in which, during the 1950s racism and segregation were still dreadfully thriving. Since the Lacks’ family were of a different color it was very difficult for them to be checked out by any kind of doctor. One ethical issue throughout the book is the proper supply of giving consent. Skloot wrote in her book, “no one told Henrietta that TeLinde was collecting samples or asked if she wanted to be a donor” (33). Henrietta had no knowledge that the doctors were going to take cells from her tumor and cells from her healthy cervical tissue to try and grow them for medical research. If Henrietta knew what her cells could have done medically then she most likely would have allowed them to take her cells and done research. However, taking someone’s cells or doing something to someone’s body without them knowing will in no way be

Lacks was born in 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia. After her mother’s death in 1924, Lacks was sent to live with her grandfather in a log cabin that had been the slave quarters of a white ancestor’s plantation. She shared a room with with her first cousin, Day Lacks. Henrietta and Day grew closer together and had a child in 1935 when Henrietta was fourteen. They had a son, Lawrence and daughter Elise. They got married in 1941, and moved to Maryland where they had three more children; David (Sonny), Deborah, and Joseph(Joe). Their daughter Elise, who was developmentally disabled, was placed in the Hospital for the Negro Insane. In January 1951, Lacks went to the John Hopkins Hospital because she felt serious abdominal pain and was bleeding. Lacks was a very strong woman who dealt with pain and suffering very well, so her going to the hospital was a big deal. She was very quickly diagnosed with cervical cancer and began radiation treatment soon after. Unbenounced to Lacks, during these treatments, doctors removed two samples from the tumor. Her pain and suffering continued for a few months until, in October, she died at the Johns Hopkins Hospital at the age of 31. (Skloot, 2011) The cells taken from her body were used to form the HeLa cell line. This case has sparked legal and ethical debates over the rights of an individual to his or her genetic material and

In the year 1951, Henrietta starting feeling discomfort and felt a knot in her womb. She went to the Hopkins Hospital, which is the only hospital that would give care to colored patients. This is the time of the Jim Crow era. where there is a practice of segregating black people. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer and treated with radium and x-ray therapy. This is also the time where scientist are trying to grow cells out of the body. Some of the tissue from Henrietta was removed from her tumor and sent down to George Gey's lab at Hopkins to be cultured, or grown, in test tubes. Neither Henrietta nor any of her family members knew about the tissue sample—and neither Gey

Before she died, a cancerous tumor was removed from her cervix (Freeman, 2016). While studying the samples collected from her biopsy, the first ever immortal cell line was discovered, which they also found to be the first cells to live outside of a human body (Biography, 2016). Her cells were labelled ‘HeLa’ cells, which derive from the first two letters of her first and last names, and were used to keep Henrietta anonymous (MedicineNet, 2016). These unique HeLa cells proved to be of immense value as it provided the field of medicine with a tool that led to the creation vaccines, cancer treatments and in vitro fertilisation among many other things (Dailey, 2017). Other than to diagnose her disease, Henrietta had never given consent for her cells to be used for further medical research. Her family was also never informed about the use of her cells until the early 1970s, neither were they compensated. Apparently “John Hopkins did not sell or profit from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells” (McDaniels, 2014). Although this may be true, HeLa cells and their products have been sold all over the world, earning millions of dollars (NPR, 2010). This raised a number of ethical issues, as the Lacks family was extremely poor and couldn’t afford health insurance or substantial education. Henrietta’s son stated that “My mother would be so proud that her cells saves lives…but she’d be so horrified that Johns Hopkins profited while her family to this day has no rights” (McDaniels, 2017). This situation sparked debates on whether Henrietta and her family should have been informed and compensated or not, and generally what the rights an individual has on his or her genetic material (Kroll,

These cells have been crucial in scientific discoveries such as in vitro fertilization and development of the polio vaccine. Despite Lacks’s extensive contributions to the medical world, she is rarely credited for being the source of these amazing cells. Lacks’s family didn’t find out until many years after her death that HeLa cells were becoming an extreme source of wealth for many scientific researchers. Henrietta’s family resented the fact that they were unaware of and not rewarded for the work being done with Henrietta's cells and tried to avoid all researchers that tried to contact them about their mother, including Rebecca Skloot. Rebecca had to gain the trust and friendship of Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s daughter, before she was able to collect any information about Henrietta’s life

Deborah is one of Henrietta’s daughters was agitated and upset about what happened to her mother and sister. So, she decided to contact with Rebecca Skloot to get some help. At first, Deborah was planned to honor her mother by put Henrietta’s information into the internet and hope to get some donations from it and build a monument to her mother, but Mrs. Gladys didn’t agree with that. . Deborah is not happy when she mentioned that “they shots my mother’s cell into space and blew her up with nuclear bombs”? It means the scientists were cloning her mother’s cell and multiply it over and over; she was panicked and disappointed about her the peoples who did that to her mother cells because she felt like her mother was outraged. The Lacks family is upset and they want to sue every scientist who’d ever worked on HeLa’s cell because they said that those scientists are profiting cells from her mother without

Permission to use Henrietta’s cells was never given. The family knew nothing of this. While HeLa cells grew into a multimillion dollar discovery. The lacks family was struggling and couldn’t even see a doctor while these people were doing this. This is until the writer of the story Rebecca Sloot and Henrietta’s daughter Deborah decide to team up to find out the story of Hela . They discover

The doctors at Hopkins did not get Henrietta’s consent to take her cells. Her cells have been made and used for many things yet her family didn’t even know they existed. The dishonesty only got worse towards the end. A doctor named McKusick asked Susan Hsu to go take blood samples from the family to test them alongside Henrietta’s. Susan Hsu called Day and he thought they were doing it to test the children for cancer. They gave the blood samples without really knowing what for. The family had yet again been lied to about something concerning themselves now and Henrietta. Deborah was scared for the results because she thought she could have the cancer but, she didn’t and she lived her life. All throughout the story the family had problems with people but the one person they trusted besides each other was Miss Rebecca. She made an impact on them and it will stay with them

Somehow, Bobbette finds out that Henrietta’s cells are still alive from her friends brother in law who worked at the National Cancer Institute. Bobbette makes it a priority to tell Lawrence. Lawrence calls John Hopkins to ask about Henrietta’s cells and discovers that they have not only been alive for twenty years, but they are bought and sold. Deborah starts getting nervous that she too will die at the same time her mother, Henrietta, died and from the same cancer. “What made her mother sick? How was part of her still living? What did it mean? What did Henrietta do for science? And did all those blood tests he was doing mean Deborah was going to die young like her mother?” (187). This discovery of Henrietta’s cells take a passive toll on

The medical community did not explain to or inform the Lacks family of the HeLa cells; along the way the scientists altogether forgot that Henrietta and her family were not abstractions but actual people. The family felt that this was unethical; they felt their mother was robbed and taken advantage of. Despite the spread of HeLa cells and the whirlwind of new research that followed, there were no recent news or stories about “the birth of the amazing HeLa cell line” (Skloot 58). In the beginning, when Gey had kept the origin of the cells- or Henrietta - a secret, no one knew where the cells had came from and no one cared to ask.