Henrietta Lacks was a poor black women who was misdiagnosed with cervical cancer but died because of adenocarcinoma, which is a cancerous type of tumor that can be found in various parts of the body. Unlike other cells, Henrietta's cells had unique quality of surviving for a long amount of period. This unique quality led to the invention of HeLa cell line. This cell line helped diagnose many diseases that did not have a cure. However, there is an ethical concern with this case. The ethical concern is this case is whether it is ethical for corporations to patent and profit from the development or sale of human genetic material. In this case, I believe it is unethical for corporations to profit from the development or sale of human genetic material …show more content…
The functionalist theory believes if a society wants to survive, it needs stability. Even if something is bad but still continues. It must serve a function in which it makes a society stable. Stratification is a “ A system in which a society ranks categories of people in a hierarchy in terms of their access to material or rewards”( functionalist theory slide). Stratification can be seen as an inequality that serves as a function to benefit the society as a whole. In this case, there is stratification between Henrietta and Dr. Gey. There are many people like Henrietta who have donated their body parts with or without consent, but there are only a few of Dr. Gey who go to school for a long to attain this position of a physician. Physician is an occupation that requires years of schooling and struggle but is is high demand for the stability of the society. There is high demand for this occupation because diseases get cured through them. These physicians cure diseased patients and find future cures for serious diseases.. Dr. Gey and doctors around the world used the HeLa cells for research to find cures to many uncured diseases. It …show more content…
In this case, the corporation/ doctors who used HeLa cells were the powerful and Henrietta and her family were powerless. John Hopkins was the hospital Henrietta was diagnosed at, The book mentions how this hospital was located in a poor black neighborhood where researchers had easy access to test subjects. These test subject were poor and uneducated and the researchers used these subjects to do research(). This shows how powerful remained in power by giving free treatment and in return using their body parts. The powerless had no power because of racial inequality, low education, and remained indebted to the hospital/doctors for the free treatment. After Henrietta's death, doctors were successful into getting an approval from Henrietta's husband(Day) to do a topsy on her body. Henrietta's husband says the doctors never mentioned anything about growing Henrietta's cells. They bribed him by saying the topsy would benefit his children in the future. Day gave consent to the doctors to do a topsy on her because it would benefit his children(164). Day also said, “ I’ve always known this much: they is the doctor, and you got to go by what they say. I don’t know as much as they do”( 164). This shows how the powerful remained in power by using their social status of being a high authority to bribe a poor black man about helping his children in the future. The children received no benefits
An abstraction can be defined as something that only exists as an idea. People are considered abstractions when they are dehumanized, forgotten about, or segregated and discriminated against. The scientific community and the media treated Henrietta Lacks and her family as abstractions in several ways including; forgetting the person behind HeLa cells, giving sub-par health care compared to Caucasians, and not giving reparations to the Lacks family. On the other hand, Rebecca Skloot offers a different perspective that is shown throughout the book. Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks describes the trials and tribulations the Lacks family has gone through because of HeLa cells and shows how seeing a person as an abstraction is a dangerous thing.
....S. Public Health Service advanced medical technology, it came at a high cost. A high cost that resulted in many African-Americans dead and a breach of trust for medical professionals. In the notable experiments of Henrietta Lacks, The Tuskegee Syphilis Men, and The Pellagra Incident, medical professions in no way protected the lives of these individuals. In fact, they used the medical advances discovered as a result of the human experimentations as a shield to mask the unethical decisions. Medical professionals targeted the African-American population and used their ignorance as a means to advance medical technologies. This in no way upholds the ethics that medical professionals should display. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks vividly exhibits the how the United States Public Health Service used, abused, and ultimately destroyed the African-American community.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of Henrietta Lacks. In the early 1951 Henrietta discovered a hard lump on the left of the entrance of her cervix, after having unexpected vaginal bleeding. She visited the Johns Hopkins hospital in East Baltimore, which was the only hospital in their area where black patients were treated. The gynecologist, Howard Jones, indeed discovers a tumor on her cervix, which he takes a biopsy off to sent it to the lab for diagnosis. In February 1951 Henrietta was called by Dr. Jones to tell about the biopsy results: “Epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, Stage I”, in other words, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Before her first radium treatment, surgeon dr. Wharton removed a sample of her cervix tumor and a sample of her healthy cervix tissue and gave this tissue to dr. George Gey, who had been trying to grow cells in his lab for years. In the meantime that Henrietta was recovering from her first treatment with radium, her cells were growing in George Gey’s lab. This all happened without the permission and the informing of Henrietta Lacks. The cells started growing in a unbelievable fast way, they doubled every 24 hours, Henrietta’s cells didn’t seem to stop growing. Henrietta’s cancer cell grew twenty times as fast as her normal healthy cells, which eventually also died a couple of days after they started growing. The first immortal human cells were grown, which was a big breakthrough in science. The HeLa cells were spread throughout the scientific world. They were used for major breakthroughs in science, for example the developing of the polio vaccine. The HeLa-cells caused a revolution in the scientific world, while Henrietta Lacks, who died Octob...
To have something stolen from you is devastating and can change your life. But what if what was taken from you will save billions of human lives? In the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, we see a woman named Henrietta had a biopsy of a cancerous tumor, and the cells from the tumor were able to live and grow outside of her body; and even better, the cells go on to find the cure for diseases such as polio. The catch is this: she signed a document giving her hospital permission to perform any medical procedure they find necessary to help her treatment, but she never gave specific permission for the cells in that biopsy to be tested and cultured. Now the big debate is over whether or not it was legal for her doctors
Henrietta Lacks is not a common household name, yet in the scientific and medical world it has become one of the most important and talked names of the century. Up until the time that this book was written, very few people knew of Henrietta Lacks and how her cells contributed to modern science, but Rebecca Skloot aimed to change this. Eventually Skloot was able to reach Henrietta’s remaining family and through them she was able to tell the story of not only the importance of the HeLa cells but also Henrietta’s life.
Most people live in capitalist societies where money matters a lot. Essentially, ownership is also of significance since it decides to whom the money goes. In present days, human tissues matter in the scientific field. Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, shows how Henrietta Lacks’s cells have been used well, and at the same time, how they have been a hot potato in science because of the problem of the ownership. This engages readers to try to answer the question, “Should legal ownership have to be given to people?” For that answer, yes. People should be given the rights to ownership over their tissues for patients to decide if they are willing to donate their tissues or not. Reasons will be explained as follows.
The first section, life, tells the reader about the beginning of HeLa. Henrietta’s symptoms began shortly after the birth of her fourth child, Deborah. Henrietta felt a knot inside her, but after only a week, Henrietta was pregnant with Joe, her fifth and final child. Four and half months after having Joe she started bleeding but it was not her time of the month. She asked her husband, Day, to take her to the hospital. At Johns Hopkins gynecology clinic, the doctor took a small sample of her lump to send to the pathology lab and sent her home. A few days later, she got her results saying the lump was “Epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, stage 1” (Skloot 27). While admitted in the hospital, she received radium treatment, and while unconscious, Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr., “shaved two dime-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta’s cervix: one from her tumor, and one from the healthy cervical tissue nearby” and placed the samples in a glass dish (Skloot 33). Her cells were given to George Gey’s lab assistant, Mary Kubicek, who was handling most of the tissue samples at Hopkins. So far, all of the samples Mary Kubicek tried to grow had died. She was handed Henriet...
“Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art,” said Josef Mengele, comparing science to an art. He was less of an artist and more of a curious, debatably crazy, doctor. He was a scientist in Nazi Germany. In general, there was a history of injustice in the world targeting a certain race. When Mengele was around, there were very few medical regulations, so no consent had to be given for doctors to take patients’ cells and other tests done on the patients’ bodies without their consent. This was the same time that Henrietta Lacks lived. Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman who went to the doctor because she had cervical cancer. Her cells were taken and are still alive in culture today (Skloot 41). Hence, her cells were nicknamed Immortal (Skloot 41). Although many, at the time, saw no issue with using a patient without consent issue with what?, on numerous occasions since then courts have determined that having consent is necessary for taking any cells. The story of Henrietta lacks is has similarities to an episode of Law and Order titled Immortal, which is an ethical conundrum. Despite this, the shows are not exactly the same and show differences between them. Both of these stories, one supposedly fictional, can also be compared to the injustices performed by Josef Mengele in Nazi Germany.
Henrietta Lacks was born on August 18, 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia. She stayed with her grandfather who also took care of her other cousins, one in particular whose name is David (Day) Lacks. As Henrietta grew up, she lived with both her Grandpa Tommy and Day and worked on his farm. Considering how Henrietta and Day were together from their childhood, it was no surprise that they started having kids and soon enough got married. As the years continued, Henrietta noticed that she kept feeling like there was a lump in her womb/cervix and discovered that there was a lump in her cervix. Soon enough, Henrietta went to Johns Hopkins Medical Center to get this check and learned that she had cervical cancer. But here is where the problem arises, Henrietta gave full consent for her cancer treatment at Hopkins, but she never gave consent for the extraction and use of her cells. During her first treatment TeLinde, the doctor treating Henrietta, removed 2 sample tissues: one from her tumor and one from healthy cervical tissue, and then proceeded to treat Henrietta, all the while no one knowing that Hopkins had obtained tissue samples from Henrietta without her consent. These samples were later handed to ...
At the time the tissue samples were collected from Henrietta Lacks she was an individual capable of deliberation about personal goals and of acting under the direction of such deliberation (Belmont Report, 1979). By collecting the samples without Henrietta’s sufficient consent she was denied of her freedom of choice. She was not given the opportunity for her decisions
What is privacy? Well, it’s the state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people. In terms of information, it is the right to have some control over how one’s own personal information is collected and used. This is a right that has been inherently protected by the U.S Constitution, agreed upon by the Supreme Court, and yet, issues around this very topic arise every day. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the author Rebecca Skloot, addresses this issue in her story of the women behind the infamous HeLa cells. Her story shows that although privacy is a right that is inherently protected by the law, situations of injustice can still occur. Examples of this in the book include when Henrietta’s cells were given to Dr. Gey without any consent from Day, the situation in which Mr. Golde’s spleen was sold without his permission, as well as when the Lacks family were recontacted and mislead about the reasons they were tested years after Henrietta’s death.
In the novel The Immoral Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, the author tells the miraculous story of one woman’s amazing contribution to science. Henrietta Lacks unknowingly provides scientists with a biopsy capable of reproducing cells at a tremendusly fast pace. The story of Henrietta Lacks demonstrates how an individual’s rights can be effortlessly breached when it involves medical science and research. Although her cells have contributed to science in many miraculous ways, there is little known about the woman whose body they derived from. Skloot is a very gifted author whose essential writing technique divides the story into three parts so that she, Henrietta
While doctors and scientists were making millions of dollars through HeLa research, Henrietta’s family was living in poverty. Lawrence Lacks, Henrietta’s firstborn child, says, “Hopkins say they gave them cells away, but they made millions! It’s not fair! She’s the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?” (pg.168). Someone who disagrees with this standpoint may argue that scientists had been trying for years to develop the perfect culture medium and had a much more hands on experience with the cells (pg.35), therefore, they should be receiving the earnings from any outcomes the HeLa cells may produce. While the scientists were in fact the brains behind the scientific advances, the family should be acknowledged on behalf of Henrietta Lacks. These successes in science would not have been possible without the origin of the cells: Henrietta Lacks. For some of the family, the primary focus was not even the profit. “Since they gone ahead and taken her cells and they been so important for science, Deborah thought, least they can do is give her credit for it.” (pg. 197). Here, Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s fourth born child, makes it clear that her primary concern is getting her mother the recognition that she deserves for her
Healthcare providers took advantage of the Lacks’ uneducation. The health care providers had power over the Lacks’ family because they knew they were uneducated. When explaining things, they never took it seriously and made sure Henrietta fully understood. Near the end of the book, Zakariyya summed up how little they knew and how frustrating it was, "Everybody always saying Henrietta Lacks donated those cells. She didn't donate nothing. They took them and didn't ask [...] What really would upset Henrietta is the fact that Dr. Gey never told the family anything—we didn't know nothing about those cells and he didn't care" (169). This shows how painful it was for the family to remain uneducated about Henrietta’s cells. Something that makes this even more powerful was that Dr. Gey did not even consider telling the
The story about Henrietta Lacks is the evidence that the ethics of medical processes need to be improved. For a long time, many patients have been victims of malpractice. Sometimes, the doctors still can do anything without the agreement from patients. Any medical institution needs to hold the integrity on any consent form that is signed by a patient. To summarize, the story of Henrietta Lacks could be the way to improve the standardization and equality of medical institutions in the future.