Ethical Principles Paper
Nadia Brown
University of Phoenix
Ethical Principles Paper
Henrietta Lacks was born on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia and she died due to complications of cervical cancer on October 4, 1951.She had been receiving treatment at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. At the hospital she was treated with radium tube inserts, which is said to be the standard treatment for cervical cancer in 1951. As a matter of routine, samples of her cervix were removed without permission. Henrietta was 31 years old when she died. In this time it was customary for doctors and researchers to remove cells from a person for testing. Likewise cells were taken from Henrietta. The problem was that the cells were
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Although this seems unfair, in 1990 the Supreme Court ruled that medical research would be undermined if patients, or in this case their families, had the power of profit from medical advancement as a result of research done from their own body parts. The Supreme Court ruling did not speak about researchers being able to profit from those same parts. This Supreme Court ruling gave medical researchers and institutions the unlimited right to manipulate body tissue of unsuspecting patients for private gain.
In the best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks the author Rebecca Skloot writes that “Henrietta’s family did not learn of her ‘immortality’ until more than 20 years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits.” Although the He-La cells have been proven to help many people, there are several issues with the way that they were obtained. Keep in mind that in this time, consent was not customary. Now, Henrietta’s family did not know of the existence of these cells for 25 years. The family learned of the cells when they were asked for additional blood samples in the 1970s.
Because of such practices the rules and laws have changed. Practices like these are considered to be unlawful and unethical. These types of
The truth is the doctors that took Henrietta’s cells were doing it for a good cause. They didn’t do it to ruin her and her family’s life, they did it to help people and save lives. There were no laws prohibiting the taking of one’s cells, in fact in a later Supreme Court of California ruling, it was actually defended. When tissues are removed from your body, with or without consent, any claim to ownership
In the example with the HeLa cells, a great debate was raised when the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was published. The debate centered around the lack of information of where the cells came from, who should have known about the original harvesting, and the lack of compensation for Henrietta’s family once the cells started generating income. Also discussed was the tendency of the medical community to
Third, although the public health discovery of the HeLa cells improved the quality of life for many families/communities and the overall nation, it did not positively influence the quality of life of Henrietta Lacks or her family. Henrietta Lacks cells were not only taken from her body once and sent to unauthorized holders, but a second time after she passed away from cervical cancer. Neither Henrietta nor her family had given consent for Dr. Gey or the coroner to remove cells from her body and send them off for research
Henrietta Lacks died in 1951 of cervical cancer, leaving behind a husband, five children and some cells taken from her without her permission. These cells continue to revolutionize the scientific field today and have played an integral role in some of the most important advances in medicine: cloning, chemotherapy, gene mapping, the polio vaccine and in vitro fertilization. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks answers a lot of questions regarding the Lacks family, but also poses a number of questions regarding ethics, consent and how far society is willing to go to make medical advances.
Anything outside of our permission or control is considered an assault. Despite our beliefs and what should be, this was quite contrary with Henrietta Lacks. An article in The Scientist noted “The global rise in biobanks – currently a $1 billion industry that is expected to grow to $2.25 billion by 2015 – also introduces other ethical concerns, including patenting of biological materials, whether donors control what happens to their tissue, whether donors should be compensated, and the privacy issues dramatically highlighted by the online publication of the HeLa genome.” Enhancing public awareness is paramount around this topic along with engaging in the ethical complexities effectively, which in the end could build awareness, boost trust, and improve an understanding around the purpose of biobanks and how they operate. Henrietta Lacks case presented a beneficial context for analyzing the legal and ethical issues that may be raised when human tissues are being used in medical research.
In 1951, Henrietta was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Doctors at John Hopkins took samples from her cervix and tried to keep them alive. After Henrietta Lacks died at the age of thirty-one, the doctors asked her husband if they could do a biopsy on her and he said no but then changed his mind. They
While performing the treatment Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr. collected Henrietta’s normal and cancerous cell and sent them to George Gey, who was the researcher collecting any type of cells that the hospital would provide for his research, this was all done without Henrietta’s knowledge. In the 1950’s segregating still existed, and “Many scientist believed that since patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment.” (Pg. 30) Henrietta had a painful death in 1951, due to all the tumors that had spread throughout her body, leaving her 5 children without a
John Moore lost the lawsuit against David Golde, according to the judge he had no right “to ownership interest in the patent - he was not one of the inventors. Nor, it concluded, could a patient exercise property rights over discarded body tissues.” (von der Ropp & Taubman, 2006). The loss of the lawsuit by Moore caused a lot of media attention and again a big ethical discussion in science. As previously said, this story also highlighted the importance of ethical and ownership laws in medical research.
Neither Lacks nor her family gave her physician permission to harvest the cells. At that same time, however, permission was neither required nor usually sought. (Washington, 1994) In the early 1970’s, the family of Henrietta Lacks began getting
In this semester’s book club, I have enjoyed the book called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This book describes a true and famous cell line in the medical research field, that is the first immortal cell line in the world, HeLa cells. Not until I finished reading this fantastic book, I know that the HeLa cells were taken from a cervical cancer patient, Henrietta Lacks, without letting her know the truth about using her cells in research, even though she died. What more surprising to me was that her family lived a hard life without health insurance while the researchers make many profits from developing HeLa cells, they were never informed about their family member’s devotion to the scientific research.
Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman who lost her life to cervical cancer. Henrietta was born on August 1, 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia (Skloot 18). Henrietta’s mother passed away, and Henrietta’s father could not raise ten children by himself. Her father took all ten children back to his hometown of Clover, Virginia where the children were divided between family members, and Henrietta ended up being raised by her grandfather who raised Henrietta and several of her cousins (Skloot 18). Henrietta grew up taking care of the family tobacco field, and she only went to school until the 6th grade. At 14, She had her first child with her cousin, David “Day” Lacks, and in 1939, Henrietta and Day had a daughter named Elsie who was developmentally
Due to severe pains, on January twenty-ninth, nineteen fifty-one, Henrietta went to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland where she was diagnosed with cervical cancer by Dr. Howard Jones. She was a patient in the “colored ward”. During her eight month long radiation treatments, doctors removed two dime-sized samples of her cancer-ridden cervix without ever informing her, asking her permission and letting her family know. Henrietta Lacks died of cancer a few months after her diagnosis on October fourth, nineteen fifty-one, at Johns Hopkins Hospital at the age of thirty-one, leaving behind her husband
In the novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, scientists steal cancerous cells from a middle aged black woman named Henrietta Lacks without her consent. She soon passed away and her cells were then put in culture and, unlike any other cells previously, succeeded in growing and reproducing outside of the body. This new breakthrough led to a scientific revolution that changed the world as we know it. The cells, called HeLa, were mass produced in factories and distributed all around the world. They allowed scientists to conduct studies and experiments that were impossible before; consequently, numerous new discoveries and cures were made and polio was eradicated. However, Henrietta’s family had no idea what her cells did
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.
The book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, was a nonfiction story about the life of Henrietta Lacks, who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Henrietta did not know that her doctor took a sample of her cancer cells a few months before she died. “Henrietta cells that called HeLa were the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory” (Skloot 22). In fact, the cells from her cervix are the most important advances in medical research. Rebecca was interested to write this story because she was anxious with the story of HeLa cells. When she was in biology class, her professor named Donald Defler gave a lecture about cells. Defler tells the story about Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells. However, the professor ended his