Arguments Against Henrietta Lacks

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Recommended: “Ethical and Bioethical Issues in Medicine

There is a saying, usually associated with acts of war. This saying is “the ends justify the means,” which means although bad things may be done to reach an end goal, the end goal may be so good that the means of reaching it are justifiable. But do the ends truly justify the means in all cases? This is something that can be debated in the story of a loving mother who lost her life while battling cervical cancer. Her name was Henrietta Lacks. Her doctor, without her true knowledge, took her cells. While Henrietta sadly died, those extracted cells lived on, continuing to split, and grow. The ethical debate is whether it was right for her doctor to extract, and sell, Henrietta’s cells without her true knowledge. The debates cover sub topics such as the doctor’s choice to extract and sell the cells, Henrietta’s lack of knowledge, Henrietta’s families …show more content…

Once the Lacks family found out, they were none too happy. They were “angry—angry that Henrietta’s cells were being sold for twenty-five dollars a vial” and their anger was justified. “Hopkins say they gave them cells away,” Lawrence yelled, “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?” Henrietta’s family’s lack of compensation is one of the unethical portions of this story. It’s possible, if the Lacks family was given compensation for their loved ones cells, this whole ordeal would be justifiable. But because the Lacks family is not living in a mansion on a hill with a large settlement, this is still up for debate. Henrietta’s family lives in poverty, while there loved one is one of the most important people to have ever lived. This is one of the stronger, pathos driven arguments against the ethics of this

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  • Essay Letter To Henrietta Lacks

    411 Words  | 1 Pages

    All I can say is amazing information of your glorious and late Henrietta Lacks. This incedible women bettered our society in ways no common human could understand at the time because of how complex this matter was and still very much indeed is. I know there is much contraversy with the matter of how scientists achived immortal cells from your late relative, and I do strongly agree with the fact that it was wrong for these researches to take advantage of this incredible women, but I know it is not for me to say nonethless it must be said that even though it was wrong to take Lacks’ cells when she was dying sometimes one must suffer to bring joy to the entire world.

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  • Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Analysis

    2151 Words  | 5 Pages

    The family first heard that Henrietta’s cells were alive and being sent around the world, twenty-two years after Henrietta’s death. After discovering that Henrietta’s cells were in circulation, the family began to blame John Hopkins for taking Henrietta’s cells without permission and commercializing the cells to make multi-million dollar industry, while her family was living in poverty without health insurance. The John Hopkins Hospital has made various statements stating that the hospital never received funds for the HeLa cells specifying that Gey donated all of his HeLa cells samples to fellow researchers. Therefore, the sole benefactors of the HeLa cells profits are the biotechnology companies, which sell vials of HeLa cells for up to ten thousand

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  • Summary: The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

    963 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

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  • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

    765 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by: Rebecca Skloot has a lot of themes, but one that is most relevant in my opinion is the racial politics of medicine. Throughout the chapters, there were examples of how Henrietta, being African American, prevented her from receiving the same treatment as the white woman sitting right next to her in the waiting room. The story begins with Henrietta going to Johns Hopkins Hospital and asking a physician to check a “knot on her womb.” Skloot describes that Henrietta had been having pain around that area for about a year, and talked about it with her family, but did not do anything until the pains got intolerable. The doctor near her house had checked if she had syphilis, but it came back negative, and he recommended her to go to John Hopkins, a known university hospital that was the only hospital in the area that would treat African American patients during the era of Jim Crow. It was a long commute, but they had no choice. Patient records detail some of her prior history and provide readers with background knowledge: Henrietta was one of ten siblings, having six or seven years of schooling, five children of her own, and a past of declining medical treatments. The odd thing was that she did not follow up on upcoming clinic visits. The tests discovered a purple lump on the cervix about the size of a nickel. Dr. Howard Jones took a sample around the tissue and sent it to the laboratory.

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  • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

    1147 Words  | 3 Pages

    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...

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  • Henrietta Lacks Essay

    877 Words  | 2 Pages

    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

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  • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

    1391 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

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  • Logic In The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

    651 Words  | 2 Pages

    People trust doctors to save lives. Everyday millions of Americans swallow pills prescribed by doctors to alleviate painful symptoms of conditions they may have. Others entrust their lives to doctors, with full trust that the doctors have the patient’s best interests in mind. In cases such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the Crownsville Hospital of the Negro Insane, and Joseph Mengele’s Research, doctors did not take care of the patients but instead focused on their self-interest. Rebecca Skloot, in her contemporary nonfiction novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, uses logos to reveal corruption in the medical field in order to protect individuals in the future.

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  • The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Essay

    1523 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

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  • Henrietta Lacks Compensation

    538 Words  | 2 Pages

    On the concept of feasibility, disputes regarding practicality make reparation impossible. The fundamental definition of “family” yields the question of deciding which members of the Lacks family should be eligible for remuneration. Would compensation conclude with Lacks’s immediate kin or expand to extended family? Her children Lawrence Lacks, Sonny Lacks, and Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman would undoubtedly receive restitution, but the passing of daughters Elsie Lacks and Deborah Lacks complicate the case for direct descendants. Hence, no just method exists to determine which relatives would qualify for restitutions. Additionally another hindrance to compensation arises: who should be held accountable for repaying the Lacks family? The default culprit Johns Hopkins merely freely distributed HeLa to other laboratories, never garnering any profit from the cells. Hundred of research institutions across the globe have received samples of HeLa; thus, tracking down each individual laboratory would be next to impossible. Even if that feat was feasible, what monetary value should be compensated? No single individual or organization has the authority to dictate an appropriate amount that can simultaneously satisfy both family and compensator as well as solve the ethical

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  • Book Review: The Immoral Life of Henrietta Lacks

    1084 Words  | 3 Pages

    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 ...

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  • The Belmont Report: The Henrietta Lacks Case

    1392 Words  | 3 Pages

    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

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  • Henrietta Lacks Ethical Issues

    1186 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

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  • The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks, By Rebecca Skloot

    1406 Words  | 3 Pages

    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

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  • Theme Of Medical Ethics In The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

    1564 Words  | 4 Pages

    Rebecca Skloot’s novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, depicts the violation of medical ethics from the patient and researcher perspectives specifically when race, poverty, and lack of medical education are factors. The novel takes place in the southern United States in 1951. Henrietta Lacks is born in a poor rural town, Clover, but eventually moves to urban Turner Station. She was diagnosed and treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins hospital where cells was unknowingly taken from her and used for scientific research. Rebecca Skloot describes this when she writes, “But first—though no one had told Henrietta that TeLinde was collecting sample or asked she wanted to be a donor—Wharton picked up a sharp knife and shaved two dime-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta's cervix: one from her tumor, and one from the healthy cervical tissue nearby. Then he placed the samples in a glass dish” (33). The simple act of taking cells, which the physicians did not even think twice about, caused decades

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