Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks: What Is Consent

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Do you believe that once your tissue has left your body, you no longer have rights to its commercial value? What about if it was taken without consent? Consent has been a major concern due to the medical advances made in the last century. After leaving the doctor’s office, anything you leave behind is no longer yours and hospitals can keep it for research sometimes forever (Skloot 315). In her work, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot uses Henrietta Lacks as an example to show how consent can be a complicated topic due to laws and research. Legal and medical scholars agree with Skloot saying the bio-technology industry is getting out of control. Thus, in her work, Rebecca Skloot examines consent, research, and the messy way …show more content…

One of the major themes of her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is consent. If she didn’t feel strongly about it, why would she spend years of her life researching and writing a book? Likewise, in Skloot’s chapter titled “A Miserable Specimen,” Skloot talks about how while Henrietta’s cells were thriving in Gey’s lab, Henrietta was in pain from cancer and the treatments (Skloot 63-66). She also states that everyone she talked to and all the records she looked at showed that George Gey—the doctor who discovered the immortality of Henrietta’s cells—never spoke with Henrietta about her cells. The only person who claims that Gey talked to Henrietta was one of his colleagues. He claims to have said, “Your cells will make you immortal” (Skloot 66). The consent issue brought up in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is similar to John Moore’s court case on commercial exploitation of …show more content…

They claim the reason these conflicts are brought to court is because of confusion over who has the rights of the samples so if there were laws about tissue samples and research there wouldn’t be as much confusion (Gantz 301). One example of this confusion is William Catalona, a prostate cancer researcher at Washington University. Caralona decided to leave Washington University and research at Northwestern University. Gantz and co-authors note, before leaving, Catalona sent out consent forms to the patient’s whom he had tissue and/or blood samples from saying “I have donated a tissue and/or blood sample for Dr. William J. Catalona's research studies. Please release all samples to Dr. Catalona at Northwestern University upon his request. I have entrusted these samples to Dr. Catalona to be used only at his direction and with his express consent for research projects" (Gantz 300). They go on to note, nearly 6,000 people returned consent forms and Washington University filed a lawsuit against Catalona claiming the University had rights to the tissue/blood (Gantz 300). Gantz, Roche, and George include this story to show that after the tissue leaves the body, it’s hard to tell who “owns” or has rights to

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