The, Gene, Grew Up Poor

Henrietta Lacks died never knowing the impact her life would have on the world of medicine. A poor, black woman living in Baltimore, Maryland in the 1950s, Henrietta was diagnosed with cervical cancer and died only nine short months after her diagnosis at the age of thirty-one. The mother of five children, Henrietta most likely died thinking her family would be her legacy. Little did she know her doctor at John Hopkins hospital, George Gey, had taken some of her cells before she died. With Henrietta’s cells, Dr. Gey was finally able to achieve a goal he had been working toward for decades – creating the first line of immortal cells (Freeman). These cells have been used for countless scientific research and have solidified Henrietta Lacks’ place

The public health committee made these vaccines and treatments aware to the public, and there were many articles and stories out about them. These responses were successful in improving the health of the nation, and the advances in medicine we have today would not be possible without it. On the contrary, they were not successful in improving the health of Henrietta or her family. The Lacks family still cannot afford the vaccines or treatments that Henrietta’s cells have made possible today. Their family was taken advantage of because they were poor and illiterate African American family. Their family has had many medical problems that the HeLa cells could have cured; yet they cannot receive any because they cannot afford

Despite significant progress in the fight against preventable disease, millions still die needlessly each year. According to UNICEF, originally known as the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, a vaccine preventable disease is responsible for 2 million fatal infections worldwide each year. About 75% of these deaths occur in children under five years of age. (N) In more vivid terms, UNICEF notes that vaccine-preventable diseases kill a child every 20 seconds. (D) Due to high rates of childhood vaccination, the United States has experienced a dramatic reduction in such deaths. A comparison of the years 1950 and 2010 clearly illustrates the benefits of vaccinations. During this 60-year period, deaths from diphtheria reduced from 410 to 0, tetanus from 336 to 3, pertussis from 1,118 to 26, and polio from 1,904 to 0. Measles deaths dropped from 468 in 1950 to 0 in 2008, the last year a United States death rate was recorded. It’s not surprising that vaccinations have been touted as one of the top ten health achievements of the 20th century by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

This is a story about Love and cells; and begins with the City of Baltimore, Maryland. Henrietta Lacks’ and her HeLa cells, while cells were derived from patients they could grow for a short period of time, they ignominiously died and could not be propagated. This changed in 1951 when a woman by the name of Henrietta Lacks was biopsied for a painful tumor and later died October 4, 1951. Cells derived from her cervical cancer were found to thrive in an artificial environment. This gave rise to the birth of biotechnology and the techniques learned from propagating these cells would eventually lead to advancements in finding a Polio vaccine. The Johns Hopkins Hospital, and Biomedical Research Facility, of the United States, only a 34 minutes’ drive distance northwest of Annapolis, Maryland is in certain ways Alien. I was first introduced to this person of interest; Ms. Henrietta Lacks while in my Pasadena College, English 1A class, and the moment I heard about her, spoken about, from my professor’s required assignment, a Narrative Essay paper. The Immortal Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta; also

The National institute of Health, Rebecca Skloot, and John Hopkins Hospital have distorted Henrietta Lacks Legacy. In 1951, the Johns Hopkins Hospital took cervical cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks, and developed the HeLa cell line. Neither Henrietta nor her family gave the hospital permission to use her cells at the time. Her cells contributed to major medical discoveries, including the development of polio vaccine. Henrietta’s family was never compensated for the money that they made off of her cells. It was not until 1973 that her children discovered, by accident, that their mother's cells, now immortalized, had become a major boon to medicine and that many people had become rich from marketing them. Ron Henrietta’s

Bringing Henrietta to Life: Creating Dialogue on Disparities across Disciplines Henrietta Lacks was a woman who made an eye-opening breakthrough in medicine in the early 1950s. Her cells were the first immortal cells to be discovered which paved the way for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in-vitro fertilization, and more. Unfortunately, there are two sides to every story. Although, modern medicine would not be where it is today without Hela cells, Henrietta’s family continued to struggle with her legacy because of the health disparities associated with ethics, race, and medicine. Henrietta’s cells were taken without her knowledge and used to cure various medical conditions.

During the 1950s, a cell line called HeLa was cultivated from a poor, African mother of five who died of cervical cancer named Henrietta Lacks. It was then mass produced for research and generated billions of dollars. Many medicinal treatments and breakthroughs, such as polio, were developed from this cell line helping billions of people to this day. Unfortunately, the woman who ultimately gave her life never received a single penny, nor her family. The Lacks family lived without insurance and still to this day has received no compensation. Given that companies and organizations, such as Microbiological Associates and the National Institutes of Health, have benefited tremendously from the cell line, they should compensate the Lacks family for it is the

I begin writing this essay about Henrietta Lacks by discussing option number three outlined in this project. Before this class had begun, I could not tell you how or why such vaccines came to be. I can almost relate to the author in the beginning of the book when she is in her college biology course and has no idea who Henrietta Lacks is. This book outlines so many big topic issues, and I feel they all play a role in how Henrietta 's cells were recovered, and stored. From my own personal viewpoint, I feel one of the biggest issues for myself personally, is the bioethics of it all.

Sonny (Henrietta’s son) stated, “…the other day President Clinton said the polio vaccine is one of the most important things that happened in the twentieth century, and her (Henrietta’s) cells involves with that too.”

In the novel The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, the story of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman, whose suffering changed the course of medical research is told through the eyes of the Lacks family. Skloot explains the story told to her by the Lacks family after much convincing that Thirty year old Henrietta Lacks was desperately looking for help in 1951 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for what she found and called a "knot" on her cervix. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer and treated with radium and x-ray therapy. In the process, some of the tissue was removed from her tumor and sent down to George Gey 's lab at Hopkins to be cultured, or grown, in test tubes. Gey was the head of the tissue culture department at Hopkins and he 'd been trying for years to get cells to divide infinitely in the lab so that the scientific community could have an infinite supply of human cells to experiment on. Neither Henrietta nor any of her family members knew about the tissue sample—and neither Gey nor Hopkins ever informed them. They didn 't inform them even after the cells began to grow amazingly fast and Gey and the rest of the scientific world realized they 'd just made a gigantic breakthrough in medical technology. Eventually, the never ending reproducing cells was used to create the polio vaccine, yet no recognition was ever given to Henrietta. Skloot presents the idea of the medical and scientific hospitals being tainted and manipulated by

This article explains how Henrietta Lacks’ cells (HeLa) were essential in developing the polio vaccine and were used for other scientific milestones, such as cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilisation. The cells were also the first to travel to space in order to see effects of zero gravity. The source also mentions how Henrietta’s family were not aware of the experimentation on her cells for twenty

At Tuskegee, the fight against polio started long before Jonas Salk used Hela cells to perfect his vaccine. The famous scientist Dr. George Washington Carver worked at the Tuskegee Institute, and in 1933, headlines told the public that he had created a cure for polio, but really he had just improved the conditions of two polio patients. Of course, this generated much publicity and more patients, who were helped using Dr. Carver’s special peanut oil. Later he even sent a sample to President Roosevelt with directions hoping that it would offer him some relief. The President thanked him in a letter. In 1941, President Roosevelt set up the Tuskegee Infantile Paralysis Care Center and improved the facilities at Tuskegee to have room for all of the new patients. When Jonas Salk was developing and testing the polio vaccine in 1953, some testing was even done at Tuskegee and testing was done using Hela cells. But, to utilize the Hela cells, they had to grow trillions of cells. “Eventually, the Tuskegee staff grew to thirty-five scientists and technicians who produced twenty thousand tubes of HeLa every week. It was the first ever cell production factory, and it started with a single vial of HeLa,”(96). In 1956 when Salk’s vaccine was ready for the public, discrimination forced even black school children being slowly integrated into white schools to wait outside the school for their vaccinations. Other black people didn’t even have an opportunity to get vaccinated, so Tuskegee started vaccinating the black public. The Tuskegee Institute made several contributions in the fight against polio and educated several famous black scientists including George Washington

“In 2011 alone, 1.5 million children died [worldwide] from diseases preventable by currently recommended vaccines” (“Immunization” 2). The magnitude of this tragedy is in part caused by the fact that some of those children simply weren’t reached by organizations like UNICEF, which aim to vaccinate children (“Immunization” 2). However, there are other reasons for the recent deaths and epidemics—such as the whooping cough epidemic of 2012, with 48,000 cases nationally in the United States—involving vaccine preventable diseases (McClay 1).

In February 2013 nine female polio vaccination workers in Nigeria were killed. This tragic incident sheds some light on resistance to vaccinations. Ten years ago Nigerian religious leaders told citizens that vaccines were unsafe, that they caused sterility. Polio is close to becoming the second disease successfully eliminated due to vaccines. Less than 250 cases of Polio were reported last year worldwide. Polio can only be eliminated if Nigeria stops resisting and if South Asia does the same ("The Dangers of Vaccine Defiance [analysis]."). Polio is still a problem in Nigeria, even though it’s not in America. Given the amount of international travel and immigration, to not vaccinate is to risk the chance of young children getting a deadly disease. (Offit) Polio causes permanent paralysis in one in every 200 cases and death in a tenth of those cases. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) claims that 10 million children have been saved from paralysis due to vaccination. Vaccinations save 10 million lives every year. Many

“A 1916 Polio epidemic in the United States killed 6,000 people and paralyzed 27,000 more” (“Polio Vaccine”). This lead to the creation of the polio vaccine that has helped to prevent polio for a very long time. The IPV and OPV vaccines played a huge role in all of this. Jonas Salk, who created the IPV vaccine and Albert Sabin, who created the OPV vaccine saved millions of people all around the world from polio (Petersen, Jennifer B). The IPV and OPV polio vaccine helped eliminate polio from the United States and helped prevent polio in other parts of the world (“Polio Vaccine”).