Henrietta Lacks Case Study

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

It was unethical because the subjects were unaware of the consequences and denied the treatment for their disease.

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.

n this unit, students will demonstrate their understanding of the cell cycle and mitosis, gathering evidence to support explanations for appropriate cell function and reproduction. Students will first compare normal and cancer cells in different stages of mitosis using a virtual lab. Students will then read portions of the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in order to gather evidence about a specific type of cancer. They will then share more information on causes and risks for various forms of cancer – gathered from research and from an interview of a person impacted by cancer – with their classmates. Finally, students will use this information to develop an explanation, with evidence, for why certain types of cancer are more prevalent

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

In the novel, the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Henrietta was a young black woman of 5 children whose cancerous cells were taken out without her knowledge. Those cells later became one of the most important tools in medicine. The case of John Moore vs. Regents of the University of California has similar ethical issues as present in the novel.

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

“He told them he was testing their immune systems; he said nothing about injecting them with someone else’s malignant cells” (Skloot 128). This is one of the many incidences in Skloot’s book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, where Skloot argued that medical research and advancements were held at a higher importance than fair treatment and rights of the patients and their families. Henrietta and the Lacks family are just one example. Skloot developed her argument by including information about uninformed consent and the Lacks family, providing examples of instances where doctors took advantage of their patients for their own benefit, and gave information about the Lacks family and their current medical situations. In order to adequately

First, the waver that Henrietta signed at John Hopkins gave permission for her doctors to (according to Skloot) (2010) “perform any operative procedures…that they deem necessary in the proper surgical care and treatment of _________________,” (pg. 31). Henrietta’s cells were taken, but not for treating her cancer. Second, because of her race and economic status, Henrietta was an easy target. . In 1951, at John Hopkins, when Henrietta received treatment at a colored operating room. Because of this segregation, The treatment was not as well and the doctors had the ability do take advantage of her but Henrietta did not have much of a choice. In the operating room, Richard TeLinde did not ask her permission to take her tissues, Even if he had, Henrietta would not have been able to say no. Skloot (2010) describes this as a time of “benevolent deception” (pg. 63), where the doctors hid information from the patients at the hospital and patients didn’t question doctors, especially when the doctors were white and the patients were black. This is what made Henrietta such a target at John Hopkins. Additionally, no one thought to tell Henrietta afterwards what George Gey had discovered about her special

When the family expressed concerns about privacy, the scientists removed the sequence from the Internet. Hudson and other NIH leaders then met with the Lacks family. Together, the family and the NIH came to an agreement. Researchers can use the HeLa genome by applying to the NIH for access. A group of scientists and Lacks family members review the applications. From now on, when a scientist publish a research conducted using HeLa cells, it must include a thank you note to the Henrietta Lacks and her family for their everlasting gifts to science (Barone 2). Science has used HeLa cells in many ways. For example, HeLa cells are used to study HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, HeLa cells prove that HPV can cause cervical cancer, there is a vaccine that protects against some strains of the virus now, and HeLa cells are also tested to see how quickly they can absorb nanoparticles, which can suggest new methods for delivering drugs to cancer cells. It’s crazy that Henrietta is technically alive after being dead for 60+ years. Her cancerous cells continue to thrive and multiple till this day, around the world. Her cells have help further the medical field, such as find vaccines and doing further studies for HPV and HIV (Barone 3-4). I’m so happy that Henrietta’s family and Henrietta get the acknowledgement they deserve, but still very disappointed that

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks had cells removed from her body without her permission, since then there have been many changes in the way medical researchers get their information. For example, medical researchers today need to obtain consent from the individuals and the parents of children from whom they are performing biomedical tests on as well as an Institutional Review Board (IRB). In addition, in 1996 the United States introduced (“HIPPA Regulations”) that offer data privacy and security provisions for safeguarding medical information. In the case of Henrietta Lacks and her HeLa cells, her rights and her privacy did not exist, so new policies and laws paved the way to help protect the rights of

The thought of being an immortal may be something that mankind can never understand or figure out, after all science can only go so far. No human has ever been an immortal, as for a human’s cells that is a different story.

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

The family feared what they believed were "night doctors who abducted black people for medical research"(Skloot). Because there was still discrimination then, they feared the worst. In my opinion the Lacks family was angry with the scientists using HeLa cells from Henrietta without the family's consent. I think they wanted everyone to know that Henrietta didn't donate her cells, they were taken without asking and without telling the family what was going to happen to them.

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.