Henrietta Lacks: Abstraction Of Human Identity

her medical records were released to a reporter and published without her family’s permission. Her sons were angry when they learned that people were buying and selling Henrietta’s cells, which helped start a multibillion dollar industry. But unfortunately for them they had no money.

Although she was taken from the world too soon, Henrietta Lacks was a warm hearted woman, and though unbeknownst to her, she would pave the way for the medical field and greatly expand our understanding of one of the nation’s

The Lacks family has been honored at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Foundation for Cancer Research. The HeLa case has raised questions about the legality of using genetic materials without permission. Neither Lacks nor her family granted permission to harvest her cells, which were then cloned and sold. The Lacks family has had limited success in gaining control of the HeLa strain. In August 2013, an agreement between the family and the National Institutes of Health granted the family acknowledgement in scientific papers and some oversight of the Lacks genome.

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.

The scientific community’s careless mistreatment of the Lacks family began with dehumanizing Henrietta’s cells in the very first lab. Generalizing people can especially be easy when one is working with their cells in a lab. The many scientists working on Henrietta’s cells must have found it easy to separate the cells from the person and reduce them to tools to aid them in the task at hand. This view may be harmless when it comes to the individual scientist, and the individual cell, but this view extended to the entire Lacks family and caused them much harm. “Meanwhile, Victor McKusick and Susan Hsu had just published the results of their research in

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a true story of a poor, Southern African-American tobacco farmer who died in 1951 at the very young age of 31 years old from cervical cancer. Little did she know that cells harvested from her tumor, which were obtained without her consent have lived on and on and became one of the most important tools in medicine today. Despite Henrietta’s story being full of legal and ethical issues, the story was one filled with success and anguish. Success for science as her cells served as advancement in medical research and development; yet was sorrowful for Henrietta and her family. This story occurred during a time of segregation in the United States, when Henrietta Lacks believed she

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

Although Henrietta lacks and John Moore have contributed a lot to the science community their stories has raised many ethical issues concerning the privacy and consent of a patient. Similar cases might not occur so often nowadays because we have established laws that protect a patient's privacy and acknowledges them before making any

In a HIPAA-conscious society today, some of the most obvious and concerning examples of the objectification of Henrietta and her family are the inconceivable breaches of privacy. Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s youngest daughter, originally chose to not request access to her mother’s medical records because “she was afraid of what she might find and how it might affect her” (Skloot 209). In 1985, however, Science 85 reporter Michael Gold published a book about Henrietta’s “Immortal Legacy” including extensive verbatim quotes from Henrietta’s medical records, including details about her previous medical history, diagnosis, pain, decline and death, and even autopsy (210). Skloot recounts Gold’s offenses, “No one in Henrietta’s family had ever seen those

Henrietta struggled with pain, bumps on her cervix, and abnormal bleeding. Henrietta was admitted into Johns Hopkins Hospital and was diagnosed with cancer in her cervix. Failing to mention her illness to her family, Henrietta began treatment at the hospital and her doctor was more than happy to help her due to his ulterior motive which was to use her

The 1950s are very different times in America, especially for blacks that are seeking medical care from hospitals or clinics, where racial discrimination is still quite widespread. The struggles that blacks face at this time period are only made worse by the poor treatment from the doctors and the sheer disregard for black patients, in comparison to white patients, “But several studies have shown that black patients were treated and hospitalized at later stages in their illnesses than white patients. And once hospitalized, they got fewer pain medications and higher mortality rates” (Skloot, 64). Henrietta’s life is greatly affected by the racism in

In 1951 there was a young black lady who was named Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta Lacks was a tobacco farmer in Clover, Virginia. Her mother died giving birth and her father moved the family to Clover, where the children were distributed among some of the close relatives. In January of 1951 she went to John Hopkins hospital, which was the only place close to her that treated black patients at the time. Lacks described a “knot” in her stomach that ended up being cervical cancer. During her treatments two samples from her

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks focuses on many issues that Henrietta and her family have faced over the years resulting from the discovery of HeLa cells. One such issue that was recurrently present was the ethical issue of informed consent, or the lack of it, in the Lacks’ case. In the beginning when Henrietta was first being treated with radium to kill her cancerous tumor, her primary doctor, Dr. TeLinde, took a sample of the tissue and sent it to Dr. Gey, head of tissue

Henrietta Lacks was a “mother of five who died of cervical cancer at only thirty-one years of age” (Gabbay). When she passed away the doctors at John Hopkins asked her husband,

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.