Who Owns Your Cells? Essay

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

The main ethical issues in this case is that researches at Johns Hopkins Hospital used Henrietta’s cell in multiple researches and send her cells to other researchers around the world without her family’s consent. Moreover, the Lackes themselves were used in medical research without informed consent, and Henrietta’s medical records were release to journalists without her family knowing.

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

The social contract of nursing is important because it reflects the nursing's code of ethics, which is to provide care to all who are in need, regardless of their cultural, social, or economic standing. The social contract exists because we rely on a guideline to continue to provide ethical care that is within our scope of practice. Unfortunately, in Rebecca Skloot’s (2010) book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” there were many ethical violations throughout the whole process about the Henrietta Lacks’ cells (HeLa). The author reveals the story about the life of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman who was diagnosed with a fast-growing cervical cancer at a young age. The cells retrieved from her cervical tumor became the first immortal cell that could survive in the lab and replicate continuously without dying. Without the consent of Henrietta Lacks and her family, these cells later became key components to the development of many groundbreaking inventions such as the polio vaccine and in vitro fertilization. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the social covenant of nursing in relation to the ethical issues behind the use of the HeLa cells without the patient’s and her family’s consent.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor, black woman who died of cervical cancer in the fifties. Her cells were taken from her during surgery, without her knowledge. However, back then there were no laws about informed consent and the mindset was entirely different. Researchers knew little about cells and how they function. Her immortal cells allowed researchers to have an ample amount of resources to be able to study cells and later on develop vaccines and treatments for many diseases. Even though her cells were cancerous, they still shared many basic characteristics of a normal cell, which allowed researchers to learn a lot about a cell’s basic function. Her story explains how medical research has developed and how health care has progressed over the past sixty years.

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 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.

"Doctors took her cells without asking. Those cells never died. A quote that sticks with me weeks after reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In this novel, Rebecca Skloot, the author was in a biology class when she first heard about HeLa cells. Little did she know she was uncovering the unknown history behind HeLa cells. The cells were taken from Henrietta Lacks a wife, mother and tobacco farmer from Virginia. One day in 1951 she checked herself in John Hopkin’s Hospital complaining about a “knot in her womb” and unusual bleeding. After signing a form stating “I hereby give consent to the staff of The Johns Hopkins Hospital to perform any operative procedures and under any anesthetic either local or general that they may deem necessary

Henrietta Lacks case was different than Mississippi and Tuskegee in some ways. In Henrietta’s case the doctors took her cells from her cervix but like in the Mississippi and Tuskegee cases they took them without Henrietta’s permission and launched a multimillion-dollar medical industry after she died. The purpose of taking Henrietta’s cells was to just run a couple tests until they died but they ended up living and growing. Instead of telling Henrietta and her family what they have been doing the doctors kept the discovery to themselves. When the discovery of the immortal cells because known every doctor got their hands on them and started running experiments on them, sending the cells to space, running test on the cells to find a cure to aids and cervical cancer etc…

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

Although some may argue that the doctor’s actions were unethical, there were no laws in place; hence, the doctors did not really commit a crime. On top of that, Gey was not the only doctor or researcher of that time who took cells without consent. If this is the case, should not the other uninformed patients, whose tissues or cells were removed but did not contribute to science as much as Henrietta’s did be compensated as well? Only because Henrietta Lacks’s cells resulted in a paramount discovery, many advocate for the need to repay monetarily. Additionally, the ruling that when tissues are removed from one’s body--with or without consent--any ownership of the organs disappears further highlights the lack of need to compensate financially. This controversial ruling allows a larger supply of cells to work

Rebecca talks about whether or not people should have the rights to their own tissues. She points out two issues, consent and money. In the past there was no informed consent, so the doctors and researchers felt free to use tissues in whatever way they wished, with little concern for patients' rights. Nowadays there is a different system, and it's required by the law to ask for a patient's informed consent.mThe money issue is a question of whether doctors should be required to tell patients if their cells or tissues are going to be used for commercial research, and what rights those donors should have. Later on, “scientists sequenced Henrietta Lacks's genome and made it public, without asking the family's permission” which was just another way in which the family was violated and looked over (Silver). Apparently Henrietta didn't get her rights, and neither did her children. Any way we look at it, if the family had received any benefits from the cells, it

In recent years, the HeLa cells and the cells backstory has caused outrage towards how the tissue was handled and the lack of informed consent from Henrietta Lacks and her family. Since then, various other cases have come to light regarding the lack of informed consent. Physicians were said to have failed to properly provide a thorough description of how and why the patient's tissue will be used. Within each lawsuit, the core remark is that there is a large grey area on how patients' tissue should be regarded by the Common Rule. Thus, there is no set rules on how to regard patients tissues once removed from the body. Scientists fear that if consent is necessary to gain access to tissues removed from patients, cost and complexity would affect

According the current law, tissues that are stored in hospital or clinical labs from patient’s biopsies and tests are considered the institution or hospital’s properties that can be used for research when they are coded in the ways that cannot be identified and connected to the donors. Even after patients give consent to procedures that retrieve their biological specimen, physicians need to explain properly to patients that they have donated the tissues to the hospital and biobanks through the action, and no longer have the autonomy and ownership over such tissues. In the case of Henrietta Lacks (Skloot 316), she accepted the cancer

One of the first ethical violations in tissue procurement is in the story of Henrietta Lacks. In 1951, as a patient at John Hopkins undergoing a biopsy, her diseased tissue cells were taken directly from her without consent or knowledge of how those cells were to be handles. Those cells turned out to be indestructible and were used to advance medicine in miraculous ways. The unbelievable amount of good that came from her cells is undeniable, but at what cost? Many believe her family should have profited from her cells, just as the researchers, private companies and doctors had done so for many years (Margonelli, 2010).