Essay On Henrietta Lacks

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How would you feel if a part of you was used for medical research without your consent? If the research led to saving many lives, would that make it alright? This situation happened to Henrietta Lacks over 50 years ago, yet she died without even knowing. The story is about powerful, cancerous cells known as “HeLa” cells that forever changed science and the health field. At least that is all everyone used to care about. No one knew the identity of the person behind the cells, or that her family was living in poverty knowing nothing of what happened. Henrietta Lacks was an African American women with a husband and five children and she was living with cervical cancer. She went to John Hopkins hospital, one of few who would treat “colored” patients, where …show more content…

The research done on these cells made miraculous changes to science and the public health field however, the want to pursue this research even further, doing whatever was necessary, left the Lacks family in the dark and not knowing who they could trust. Public health affects everyone daily and is constantly around us. It is what society does to protect and identify potential threats to the public’s health (Schneider 4). Issues of public health were often depicted in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Every time experiments were run on the Lacks family, public health was involved as well as all the doctors who purchased HeLa cells to do experimentation of their own. The experiments run on the Lacks family fall both under the public policy and intrapersonal levels. They fall under public policy because the people conducting the experiments, such as drawing blood samples, have regulations and limitations to what they can do. However, they were telling the family that it was to make sure that they did not have the same cancer as Henrietta, when this was not the case. The scientist conducting

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