Argument Against Henrietta Lack

During the year of 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a less fortunate, young black woman, was told that she had cervical cancer by Johns Hopkins Hospital. During her diagnosis of cancer, cells were taken from her body without her knowing. She had simply gone to the gynecology clinic at Johns Hopkins to figure out why there was a “knot in her womb.” Being a black woman in the time of Jim Crow laws, the John Hopkins university hospital was the only hospital that agreed to treat her for her cervical tumor. Dr Richard TeLinde, researcher at Johns Hopkins, wanted to find and prove that noninvasive cervical cancer was actually just an early stage invasive cancer as this was a big debate in this field at the time. Without growing normal, noninvasive cancerous,

She was under the impression that any surgery that was operated on her would be deemed “necessary.” However, whether or not the operations were necessary for her health was not exactly clear because after Dr. TeLinde performed multiple tests on Henrietta, he removed two samples of her cervical tissue, one from the tumor and the other was from healthy cervical tissue. After Dr. TeLinde used radiation to kill her cervical cancer, he sent these samples of her cervical tissue to Dr. Gey. The surgeon may have deemed this research advancement as a necessary reason to remove Henrietta’s cervical tissue during her

And even though the Lacks family learns for the first time in 1973 that Henrietta’s cells are still alive, it wasn’t until 1991 that it became illegal for research to be done without informed consent (The Common Rule).The family of Henrietta Lacks had not been informed because there were no laws requiring it. This can lead us to believe that at the same time, many other individuals were not being fully informed as to what they were getting into. Today “many bioethicists question why the family [of Henrietta Lacks] was left in the dark.”