Henrietta Lacks Informed Consent

Patients have no rights to samples taken from them as they become biological waste. Yet it is not necessary for doctors to obtain consent to store the same tissues that are supposed to be biological waste and use the samples for research. The lines in bioethics are blurred and there should be stricter guidelines on how research should be conducted and exactly who should benefit from. I believe the tissue donor should receive some sort of compensation because it not for said cells, the research would not exist. As with HeLa cells, without Henrietta Lacks, there would be no HeLa cells nor any

HeLa cells were used in all kinds of research and cure many diseases. They were used in the first mission to space to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity, they were a very important part to finding the polio vaccine, they were used in cloning, gene mapping and also in vitro fertilization (History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places/ Smithsonian). Henrietta never had claim to her cell and what they did until 20 years after she died and finally, even after efforts to keep it hiding, in 1970s her real name started to leak out into the

HeLa cells were taken from Henrietta unbeknownst to her by George Gey, a cell biologist at Johns Hopkins hospital, when she went in for a biopsy of the tumor growing inside of her. Today, those cells have been crucial in the development of the polio vaccine, aided scientists in learning more about the secrets of cancer, helped in cloning and gene mapping, and have ultimately, been sold by the billions. Even still, Henrietta was buried in an unmarked grave.

These cells (nicknamed HeLa to protect Henriettas identity) reproduced infinitely like no other. George Gey put HeLa in culture which is cells that are removed from a plant or animal then are put into an artificial environment that is sterile warm and fed with the utmost of vigilance with medium(Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. ). Medium what the cells are fed with were made up of multiple things, because scientists back then used all kinds of things for medium but George Gey used chicken blood, special salts and placenta(Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. ).

The Fluidity of Henrietta Lacks. Gender Norms & Racial Bias in the study of the Modern “Henrietta Lacks” Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman whose cancer cells were the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. An immortalized cell line will reproduce indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data to present day. Lacks was the unwitting source of these cells from a tumor biopsied during treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. in 1951. The cells were then cultured by George Otto Gey who created the cell line known as HeLa, which is still

Within the novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks written by Rebecca Skloot, Lacks and her family face many adversities. One adversity major mistreatment of Henrietta is while she's in the care of Dr. Gey. During her struggles Dr. Gey was removing tissue samples without informing Lacks his full intentions which was very wrong, but the arrival of Henrietta's cells proved to be vital in the advancement of the Science and medical fields. A sudden boom of new scientific research, and medical breakthroughs were now within in reach. One example of a major solution solved by HeLa cells was the expense of culturing cells, before Scientist would have to kill monkeys to obtain cells in order to run neutralization tests, this proved to be costly and

Just about everyone was profiting from HeLa cells except her own family. Throughout the book we can follow the interesting stories of Henrietta’s children and the scientist who worked with HeLa cells. Many ethical questions were raised and we can engage in the argument that the author poses. Is consent from patients’ necessary to proceed with testing on patients who are unaware of the procedures being done on them?

Who was Henrietta Lacks? Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman. She was born in August 1, 1920 as Loretta Pleasant. Henrietta was born in Roanoke, Virginia.

Gey took a tissue sample from her, and scientists who were making discoveries obviously benefitted financially from Henrietta's cells since they were making profit from their creations. So the Lacks family was enraged when they found out that people were profiting from their mother's cells that Dr. Gey stole. They felt that since Henrietta was their mother, they owned the HeLa cells and the hospital did not have the right to experiment on the cells without their consent. They thought that they should at least get compensation for the scientific discoveries. That brings up the question of who owns the cells and whether or not the family should be making any

There is an undeniable interweaving between the histories of medicine and biomedical research. The two intricate stories can be viewed as one positive history which has brought overall beneficial outcomes for the general well-being of society. However, there is an often overlooked component, one of medical exploitation and manipulation for the purpose of biomedical advances, that is interlaced within these histories. This history is epitomized by the widespread use of HeLa cells in biomedical research. HeLa cells are the first immortal line of human cells, and since their discovery in 1951 have been “the standard laboratory workhorse” (Skloot 4).

One of the ironies explored in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the dichotomy between the vast value of the HeLa cell line—which has been used in the development of the polio vaccine, nuclear bomb testing, the

The cells John Hopkins took from Henrietta’s tumor helped launch a multibillion-dollar industry, yet her family had no money (Monsen, 2011, p.2). “In the past sixty-three years several scientists have won Nobel prizes for research on HeLa Cells.” Henrietta’s genome wasn’t the first to be published. Unlike Henrietta, the other patients gave consent for the doctors to take samples (Barone, 2014,

Participation Portfolio 1 Asst 3: Henrietta Lacks Discussion Questions   Please answers each of the following questions, and be prepared to discuss in class   1. Please outline the history of Henrietta Lacks 's tissue cells. Who did what with the cells, when, where and for what purpose? Who benefited, scientifically, medically, and monetarily?

The origination of HeLa cells, used in biomedical research for a potential cure for cancer, had made many ground breaking discoveries in science; all thanks to one woman, Mrs. Henrietta Lacks. The history of Mrs. Lacks’s contribution to these studies raised many ethical issues concerning healthcare practice. In the short film, The Way of All Flesh, we learn how these cells were revealed by direct violation of ethical principles. During the 1950s, matters regarding informed consent practices were in their beginning stages of implementation.

In the case of Henrietta Lacks and her family, the mistreatment of doctors and lack of informed consent defined nearly 60 years of the family’s history. Henrietta Lacks and her children had little to no information about serious medical procedures and the use of Henrietta’s cells in research. Henrietta’s cells launched a multibillion-dollar industry without her consent and doctors even took advantage of her children’s lack of education to continue their research without questions: “[Doctor] did not explain why he was having someone draw blood from Deborah… he wrote a phone number and told her to use it for making more appointments to give more blood” (188). Deborah did not have the knowledge to understand the demands or requests the doctors made of her, and the doctors did not inform her explicitly.