In Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

Our DNA holds more information about us than anything else does, just a single strand of hair is enough to know who you are, where you been and what you have been doing. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, talks about the injustice Henrietta went through where companies made millions of her HeLa cell line. Henrietta had no clue what doctors did to her yet she and her family never saw a penny from the profits made, never did she give permission. Leading to the taking of peoples DNA without consent has become a troubling problem in the US. The injustice faced by Henrietta Lacks and others have from DNA and companies making money, yet some benefits came out of this such as the HeLa line which is used for various reasons now.

The use of Henrietta Lacks cells has led to many scientific breakthroughs, e.g., the cure to polio, cloning, and the human genome project. Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951. These cells underwent a mutation that caused them to become immortal, meaning that they continue to divide since her death in 1951 to this very day. However, her cells raise an ethical question, because before she died she did not give consent for scientists to use her cells and after she died they did not tell her family that they were using them. This has been an ongoing controversy because the cells have been so beneficial for society, but they are derived from shady procedures.

These cells were then made into the immortal cell line that has been used widely in research. The unfortunate part of the situation was while scientists were profiting from their work with the HeLa cells, Lacks’ family was living in poverty without proper health insurance or the knowledge of Henrietta’s contribution to science. The case of Henrietta Lacks draws attention to the bioethical issues of informed consent, beneficence, not using people as a means to an end, and spreading knowledge. The primary ethical debate that arose from the discussion of HeLa cells is the issue of informed consent. Lacks and her family were not told of the cells taken from her body until more than 20 years after Lacks had passed away.

Her family was never informed about what had been accomplished with the use of her cells. The Lacks family has not received anything from the cell line to this day, although their mother’s cells have been bought and sold by many. This bestseller tells the stories of HeLa and traces the history of the cell while highlighting the ethical and legal issues of the research. Henrietta’s name is associated with HeLa cells after a doctor took her cells without her knowing (the name derives from the first two letters of her first and last names). It is told that George Gey, a cancer researcher at Hopkins was longing to study cancer cells however, the method failed because the cells were studied outside of the body and died.

President Bush, on August 9, 2001, addressed the nation on prime-ti... ... middle of paper ... ...m any real human trails puts discourage in many people. People want fast answers and scientists cannot give them fast answers with this research because it is so tedious. Another thing is the cost factor. Even though there is no federal money being spent on embryonic stem cell research, there are many private sectors that are being paid to do this research. Also, the lives of women contributing to donate cells are at risk.

throughout the article she talks about how the HeLa helped created cures for various diseases, and how groundbreaking they are. But when diving further into her research she finds out that there was a face behind it all: Henrietta Lacks. When looking into it she discovers that Henrietta's family was never informed that her cells were used for scientific discoveries in this caused much hardship for her family. As seen when Rebecca states “ jet said the family was angry- angry that Henrietta's cells were being sold for twenty-five dollars of vial and angry that articles had been published about the cells without their knowledge (23)” In this quote it is seen that when not taking into consideration the effects that new technology, it can cause emotional pain. As seen when Henrietta's family wasn't informed of the use of her cells and publish articles on the subject.

HeLa cells became one of the most significant tools in medicine, yet, the woman and the story behind the cells are virtually unknown to the public. As portrayed in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Henrietta Lacks’ cells have been bought and sold by the billions but her family continues to live in poverty. These cells are credited to many significant medical successes, but her family didn’t even know they existed and were left without the resources to benefit from these great discoveries. Lack of education, lack of communication and a lack of understanding contributed to the ethical issues that arose from Lacks’ experience because of the racial, social and historical limitations that were common in this time. The author, Rebecca Skloot successfully approaches the ethical issues the Lacks’ family endured by taking a unique perspective to developing

The most frustrating thing is without her permission, they took samples of her tumor and gave to Dr. Gey who later named them “HeLa” cells. Which is indeed against the code of ethics in medical science. I can imagine what it is like to feel helpless in a situation like this, when human life is taken for granted. In 1951, Dr. George Gey cultured the cells and they were the first “immortal” human cell produces. HeLa cells were used for research in many ways as cancer, polio, AIDS and so on.

As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel says, “Human beings were not human beings in their eyes. They were abstractions.” While this quote is about Nazi doctors and their human experiments, one can easily apply this to the case of Henrietta and her cells. No one cared about Henrietta, the black woman who unknowingly gave her cells to science, but instead they cared immensely about HeLa, the cells that launched a multi-billion dollar industry and would contribute themselves endlessly to medical research. The woman who these cells came from remained unidentified for decades and the family she left behind was living in poverty. For the scientific community, endless cell life was huge, but it would mean nothing to her family until 1973 when they first learned that Henrietta’s cells were still alive.

The more time that was spent studying these cells, the more questions that arose in the quest to find the cure for cancer, the greatest in medicine were being defeated by the cells of an African American woman. Therefore, when the statement is made that Henrietta beat science, I take it as her condition and cells were so complex that even the greatest minds could not figure out why they did what they did. She still contributed to many other solutions that could save millions and billions of