Essay On Henrietta Lacks
"In this case, something went wrong: in Henrietta's medical record, one of her doctors wrote, 'Told she could not have any more children. Says if she had been told so before, she would not have gone through with treatment.' But by the time she found out, it was too late" (48).
"'What would really upset Henrietta is that fact that Dr. Gey never told the family anything--we didn't know nothing about those cells and he didn't care. That just rubbed us the wrong way. I just kept asking everybody, 'Why didn't they say anything to the family?' They knew how to contact us! If Dr. Gey wasn't dead, I think I would have killed him my self" (169).
"Since at least the 1800s, black oral history has been filled with tales of 'night doctors' who kidnapped black people for research. And there were disturbing truths behind those stories" (165).
"Pomerant suggested that Gey should have finished his own HeLa research before 'releasing [HeLa] to the general public since once released it becomes general scientific property.' But Gey hadn't done that. And as soon as HeLa became 'general scientific property,' people started wondering about the woman behind the cells" (104).
- taking tissue samples without her or her family knowledge
-taken to a color only operations room
- colored only bathroom, and waiting room …show more content…
- not formally telling her what she was signing for In 1951, Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer.
Without asking or informing her, Henrietta’s doctors at John Hopkins took tissue samples from her cervix and attempted to grow them and keep them alive. After she died, these cells, known as HeLa cells, became essential to scientific research, contributing to developments like vaccines and other medical advancements. However because of their race and socio-economic status, Henrietta Lacks and the rest of the Lacks family were exploited by doctors, researchers, and the media. Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks explores these issues, without taking advantage of them
herself. The doctors at John Hopkins, specifically Richard TeLinde and George Gey, exploited Henrietta by taking her cells, growing them, and giving them away without letting her give informed consent. From Immortal, exploitation by the doctors is explained as doctors doing unnecessary and invasive procedures on vulnerable patients, denying patients proper information, and/or denying patients the opportunity to give informed consent. From my understanding of informed consent from Immortal, this is when one understands the risks and benefits of what one is consenting to. It also includes understanding what one’s tissues could be used for and understanding that one may not be entitled to compensation even if one’s tissues help research something that results in monetary gain by another party. There are many reasons that Henrietta Lacks did not give informed consent. First, the form that Henrietta signed at John Hopkins gave permission for her doctors to “perform any operative procedures…that they deem necessary in the proper surgical care and treatment of _________________,” (Skloot, Immortal, pg. 31). Henrietta’s tissues were taken, but not for the purpose of treating her cancer (as it had already been diagnosed and she was about to begin radium treatments). Second, because of her racial and socio-economic status, Henrietta was vulnerable and may have felt she didn’t have much of a choice when it came to giving consent. In 1951, at Hopkins, when Henrietta received treatment, the doctors, nurses, and technicians were white (31). Henrietta was not. She was taken to a “colored-only” operating room at the hospital that she had driven twenty miles to get to because it was the closest hospital that would treat black people (32, 15). Because of this racial and social divide (or one might say injustice) and because of how she was treated, Henrietta did not have much of a choice. She was a black, lower-class woman and for this reason Richard TeLinde did not ask her permission to take her tissues. Even if he had, Henrietta would not have been able to say no. Skloot describes this as a time of “benevolent deception” (63), where doctors withheld information from patients and patients didn’t question doctors, especially when the doctors were white and the patients were black. This is what made Henrietta so vulnerable in the Hopkins setting. Additionally, no one thought to tell Henrietta afterwards what George Gey had discovered about her special tissues. The racial and social divide between the Hopkins staff and the Lacks family allowed the Hopkins staff to withhold important information from them. This was apparent in Henrietta’s case, but was also apparent after her death when the doctors at Hopkins asked Day, Henrietta’s husband, if they could do an autopsy on her body. On the phone he refused, but once he was asked in person by a white doctor at the hospital, he gave in and let them do it (90). This is another example of vulnerability due to the difference in Day’s racial and socio-economic status compared to the doctors’. Day had no choice but to succumb to their recommendations. The doctors wanted the autopsy so that they could take more tissue samples from Henrietta’s body. They put Day in the position of possibly saying no and defying their requests, which, because of his vulnerability, was unlikely to happen in the first place. Due to this vulnerability, Henrietta and the Lacks family faced exploitation from other sources. For example, once Gey recognized how special the HeLa cells were, and without acknowledging where the cells came from, he started to give them away (94). There was never any recognition that Henrietta Lacks was the donor, and it never crossed Gey’s mind to give any sort of financial compensation to the Lacks family. This created a problem that wasn’t seen by the Lacks family for many years. Since they had not known about HeLa cells and the nature of their mother’s contribution to science, they were not able to do anything about it. Either way, whether or not financial compensation for the commodification of Henrietta’s tissues was bound under law, the morally right thing to do would have been to at least tell the Lacks family what had become of them. The commodification of tissues means that they were being produced and sold. HeLa cells became part of a very profitable industry. The Lacks family was deprived of this knowledge for many years, another way in which they were unknowingly exploited. Although Rebecca Skloot mentions in her afterword that the Lacks family has little to no legal rights pertaining to this issue now, she says this is partly because the statute of limitations has passed (328). This means that the given amount of time in which they had to bring this issue to court has gone and passed. If the Lacks family had known sooner, they may have been able to take legal action against the doctors or the media. This would mean possible compensation which could have helped pay for things as simple as health insurance for the Lacks family. Some say that Henrietta and the Lacks family were not taken advantage of. The reasons for this are usually because the cells were no longer a part of Henrietta and therefore she, and her family, have no claim to them. The problem however, is not over ownership of the tissues. The real issue is that Henrietta and her family were kept in the dark and were not given a chance to give real informed consent as previously described. Because of racial and socio-economic pressure, they were vulnerable. They were not told that tissues were taken, and while these tissues made many doctors and researches rich, the Lacks family could not even afford basic health insurance. In these ways, Henrietta and the Lacks family were exploited by the doctors. Even after Henrietta’s death, while her cells lived on and contributed to countless scientific advancements, the media exploited the family even further. At this point in the story, George Gey seems more conscious of the effect this could have on Henrietta’s memory and the Lacks family if her name was released. It could have been partly in his own self-interest when Gey misled reporters about Henrietta’s identity, but in the end, he did make in effort to stop the media from exploiting the Lacks family any further (106). It is possible that Gey really did want to protect the privacy and rights of the Lacks family and the memory of Henrietta, but it is also entirely possible that he was merely worried about being held responsible for their rights not being protected like Richard TeLinde was (107). They both tried however (for whatever the reason was) to keep Henrietta’s name out of the media, and that’s worth something. It is hard to say whether it is fortunate or unfortunate that Henrietta’s name was mistaken in the media. When the Lacks family and those close to them finally found out about the HeLa cells, they seemed to want Henrietta to be recognized for the contribution she had made to scientific research. Henrietta had suffered and died, but her cells lived on. The HeLa cells had helped countless numbers of people. Skloot quotes Sonny, Henrietta’s son, as saying, “I just hope Hopkins and some of the other folks who benefitted off her cells will do something to honor her and make right with the family,” (328). Similarly, when Skloot first meets Courtney Speed, owner of a foundation dedicated to creating a Henrietta Lacks Museum, Courtney says, “This story just got to be told! Praise the Lord, people got to know about Henrietta!” (73). So Henrietta finally getting the recognition, at least a little bit, seemed like a good thing to her family and those around them. That being said, it brought a lot of unwanted attention to them from the media, doctors, and researchers who wanted a piece of the HeLa gene line. It negatively affected Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, who never really knew her mother, but Henrietta was all she heard about. When Deborah first heard of the book, she too was excited to get her mother’s story out there. So yes, the Lacks family and Henrietta herself were exploited by the media in many ways, but when it came to a book about Henrietta’s life, they were eventually excited about getting the true story out. That was Rebecca Skloot’s job: getting the story out. In Immortal, Skloot did take sides. Her word choices and the way she frames many issues in the book make her seem partial towards Henrietta and the rest of the Lacks family, while being biased against the doctors, researchers, and the media also involved. For example, when describing one of Henrietta’s procedures at Hopkins, Skloot narrates it as, “Doctors examined her inside and out, pressing on her stomach, inserting new catheters into her bladder, fingers into her vagina and anus, needles into her veins,” (40). The way she framed this, the doctors appear more invasive than they may have if this scene had been framed a different way. Skloot wants to make Henrietta seem like a victim, because she was. Henrietta was extremely vulnerable to the doctors and as previously mentioned, she did not have the option to object to or question what the doctors were doing. Skloot uses specific quotes and frames situations in such a way to keep the readers feeling sympathetic towards Henrietta. Rebecca Skloot also seems in agreement with informed consent regarding taking tissues and using them for research (especially in Henrietta’s case). In her afterword, she also makes an argument against the commercialization of tissues in some cases. Skloot says, “The thing is, people cant ‘think of [personally taking advantage of the capitalist nature of the tissue industry] on the front end’ unless they know their tissues might be valuable to researches in the first place,” (326). The point of her book is to show the injustice that Henrietta and the Lacks family faced, and voice her opinion on informed consent. Because of the reasons listed above, she seems to be in favor of informed consent when it comes to tissues being used for research and for commercialization. Rebecca Skloot however, does not exploit Henrietta or her family while trying to make this point. Subjects of books can be exploited by authors in many ways. For example, one way an author could exploit someone in his or her book would be by unfairly misrepresenting the subject or painting them in a bad light without their previous knowledge or review (this could also be considered libel, the malicious action of falsifying information, in many cases). Rebecca Skloot does not do this. Although she seems to take Henrietta’s side throughout the book, she gives backgrounds for the other subjects like George Gey. She describes Gey’s life as a scientific innovator on pages 38 through 39 of Immortal, but does not let this get in the way of her argument that what he did was wrong. SPJ.org, the online website for the Society of Professional Journalists, lists another way a subject of a book could be exploited by an author: by getting private information through “surreptitious methods” (“SPJ Code of Ethics, SPJ.org). Skloot makes a claim of honesty in the very beginning of book saying, “This is work of non-fiction. No names have been changed, no characters invented, no events fabricated,” (xii). Because Skloot followed these general guidelines, she avoided treating Henrietta, the Lacks family, or anyone else profiled in Immortal unethically. Similarly, while Skloot did gain recognition for the book, so did Henrietta Lacks and her family. As for the financial gain by Skloot through the publishing of Immortal, she has set up the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, which she donates some of the proceeds to. While the Lacks family doesn’t financially gain anything from Immortal, Skloot acknowledges the “few legal options” they have (328). It seems she is in favor of the Lacks family receiving financial compensation because she includes this in her afterword. Finally, it is obvious that Rebecca Skloot wrote Immortal with good intentions. In the prologue Skloot writes about first hearing about Henrietta and the HeLa cells in high school. She describes wanting to learn and write about Henrietta ever since then. The motive for her writing the book was not to exploit anyone, it was to research, learn, and educate others about Henrietta Lacks and her story. In her book Immortal, Rebecca Skloot tells the story of a woman and a family who were taken advantage of. Henrietta Lacks and the rest of the Lacks family were exploited by doctors, researchers, and the media and Skloot aimed to make it right. In a fair, non-exploitative way, Skloot makes a case for the Lacks family and explains what happened and how they were taken advantage of. The lack of informed consent and financial compensation, the racial and social injustice, and the exploitation by the media led Rebecca Skloot to get the true story out about Henrietta Lacks and the origin of the famous HeLa cells.
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"'What would really upset Henrietta is that fact that Dr. Gey never told the family anything--we didn't know nothing about those cells and he didn't care. That just rubbed us the wrong way. I just kept asking everybody, 'Why didn't they say anything to the family?' They knew how to contact us! If Dr. Gey wasn't dead, I think I would have killed him my self" (169).
"Since at least the 1800s, black oral history has been filled with tales of 'night doctors' who kidnapped black people for research. And there were disturbing truths behind those stories" (165).
"Pomerant suggested that Gey should have finished his own HeLa research before 'releasing [HeLa] to the general public since once released it becomes general scientific property.' But Gey hadn't done that. And as soon as HeLa became 'general scientific property,' people started wondering about the woman behind the cells" (104).
- taking tissue samples without her or her family knowledge
-taken to a color only operations room
- colored only bathroom, and waiting room …show more content…
- not formally telling her what she was signing for In 1951, Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer.
Without asking or informing her, Henrietta’s doctors at John Hopkins took tissue samples from her cervix and attempted to grow them and keep them alive. After she died, these cells, known as HeLa cells, became essential to scientific research, contributing to developments like vaccines and other medical advancements. However because of their race and socio-economic status, Henrietta Lacks and the rest of the Lacks family were exploited by doctors, researchers, and the media. Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks explores these issues, without taking advantage of them
herself. The doctors at John Hopkins, specifically Richard TeLinde and George Gey, exploited Henrietta by taking her cells, growing them, and giving them away without letting her give informed consent. From Immortal, exploitation by the doctors is explained as doctors doing unnecessary and invasive procedures on vulnerable patients, denying patients proper information, and/or denying patients the opportunity to give informed consent. From my understanding of informed consent from Immortal, this is when one understands the risks and benefits of what one is consenting to. It also includes understanding what one’s tissues could be used for and understanding that one may not be entitled to compensation even if one’s tissues help research something that results in monetary gain by another party. There are many reasons that Henrietta Lacks did not give informed consent. First, the form that Henrietta signed at John Hopkins gave permission for her doctors to “perform any operative procedures…that they deem necessary in the proper surgical care and treatment of _________________,” (Skloot, Immortal, pg. 31). Henrietta’s tissues were taken, but not for the purpose of treating her cancer (as it had already been diagnosed and she was about to begin radium treatments). Second, because of her racial and socio-economic status, Henrietta was vulnerable and may have felt she didn’t have much of a choice when it came to giving consent. In 1951, at Hopkins, when Henrietta received treatment, the doctors, nurses, and technicians were white (31). Henrietta was not. She was taken to a “colored-only” operating room at the hospital that she had driven twenty miles to get to because it was the closest hospital that would treat black people (32, 15). Because of this racial and social divide (or one might say injustice) and because of how she was treated, Henrietta did not have much of a choice. She was a black, lower-class woman and for this reason Richard TeLinde did not ask her permission to take her tissues. Even if he had, Henrietta would not have been able to say no. Skloot describes this as a time of “benevolent deception” (63), where doctors withheld information from patients and patients didn’t question doctors, especially when the doctors were white and the patients were black. This is what made Henrietta so vulnerable in the Hopkins setting. Additionally, no one thought to tell Henrietta afterwards what George Gey had discovered about her special tissues. The racial and social divide between the Hopkins staff and the Lacks family allowed the Hopkins staff to withhold important information from them. This was apparent in Henrietta’s case, but was also apparent after her death when the doctors at Hopkins asked Day, Henrietta’s husband, if they could do an autopsy on her body. On the phone he refused, but once he was asked in person by a white doctor at the hospital, he gave in and let them do it (90). This is another example of vulnerability due to the difference in Day’s racial and socio-economic status compared to the doctors’. Day had no choice but to succumb to their recommendations. The doctors wanted the autopsy so that they could take more tissue samples from Henrietta’s body. They put Day in the position of possibly saying no and defying their requests, which, because of his vulnerability, was unlikely to happen in the first place. Due to this vulnerability, Henrietta and the Lacks family faced exploitation from other sources. For example, once Gey recognized how special the HeLa cells were, and without acknowledging where the cells came from, he started to give them away (94). There was never any recognition that Henrietta Lacks was the donor, and it never crossed Gey’s mind to give any sort of financial compensation to the Lacks family. This created a problem that wasn’t seen by the Lacks family for many years. Since they had not known about HeLa cells and the nature of their mother’s contribution to science, they were not able to do anything about it. Either way, whether or not financial compensation for the commodification of Henrietta’s tissues was bound under law, the morally right thing to do would have been to at least tell the Lacks family what had become of them. The commodification of tissues means that they were being produced and sold. HeLa cells became part of a very profitable industry. The Lacks family was deprived of this knowledge for many years, another way in which they were unknowingly exploited. Although Rebecca Skloot mentions in her afterword that the Lacks family has little to no legal rights pertaining to this issue now, she says this is partly because the statute of limitations has passed (328). This means that the given amount of time in which they had to bring this issue to court has gone and passed. If the Lacks family had known sooner, they may have been able to take legal action against the doctors or the media. This would mean possible compensation which could have helped pay for things as simple as health insurance for the Lacks family. Some say that Henrietta and the Lacks family were not taken advantage of. The reasons for this are usually because the cells were no longer a part of Henrietta and therefore she, and her family, have no claim to them. The problem however, is not over ownership of the tissues. The real issue is that Henrietta and her family were kept in the dark and were not given a chance to give real informed consent as previously described. Because of racial and socio-economic pressure, they were vulnerable. They were not told that tissues were taken, and while these tissues made many doctors and researches rich, the Lacks family could not even afford basic health insurance. In these ways, Henrietta and the Lacks family were exploited by the doctors. Even after Henrietta’s death, while her cells lived on and contributed to countless scientific advancements, the media exploited the family even further. At this point in the story, George Gey seems more conscious of the effect this could have on Henrietta’s memory and the Lacks family if her name was released. It could have been partly in his own self-interest when Gey misled reporters about Henrietta’s identity, but in the end, he did make in effort to stop the media from exploiting the Lacks family any further (106). It is possible that Gey really did want to protect the privacy and rights of the Lacks family and the memory of Henrietta, but it is also entirely possible that he was merely worried about being held responsible for their rights not being protected like Richard TeLinde was (107). They both tried however (for whatever the reason was) to keep Henrietta’s name out of the media, and that’s worth something. It is hard to say whether it is fortunate or unfortunate that Henrietta’s name was mistaken in the media. When the Lacks family and those close to them finally found out about the HeLa cells, they seemed to want Henrietta to be recognized for the contribution she had made to scientific research. Henrietta had suffered and died, but her cells lived on. The HeLa cells had helped countless numbers of people. Skloot quotes Sonny, Henrietta’s son, as saying, “I just hope Hopkins and some of the other folks who benefitted off her cells will do something to honor her and make right with the family,” (328). Similarly, when Skloot first meets Courtney Speed, owner of a foundation dedicated to creating a Henrietta Lacks Museum, Courtney says, “This story just got to be told! Praise the Lord, people got to know about Henrietta!” (73). So Henrietta finally getting the recognition, at least a little bit, seemed like a good thing to her family and those around them. That being said, it brought a lot of unwanted attention to them from the media, doctors, and researchers who wanted a piece of the HeLa gene line. It negatively affected Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, who never really knew her mother, but Henrietta was all she heard about. When Deborah first heard of the book, she too was excited to get her mother’s story out there. So yes, the Lacks family and Henrietta herself were exploited by the media in many ways, but when it came to a book about Henrietta’s life, they were eventually excited about getting the true story out. That was Rebecca Skloot’s job: getting the story out. In Immortal, Skloot did take sides. Her word choices and the way she frames many issues in the book make her seem partial towards Henrietta and the rest of the Lacks family, while being biased against the doctors, researchers, and the media also involved. For example, when describing one of Henrietta’s procedures at Hopkins, Skloot narrates it as, “Doctors examined her inside and out, pressing on her stomach, inserting new catheters into her bladder, fingers into her vagina and anus, needles into her veins,” (40). The way she framed this, the doctors appear more invasive than they may have if this scene had been framed a different way. Skloot wants to make Henrietta seem like a victim, because she was. Henrietta was extremely vulnerable to the doctors and as previously mentioned, she did not have the option to object to or question what the doctors were doing. Skloot uses specific quotes and frames situations in such a way to keep the readers feeling sympathetic towards Henrietta. Rebecca Skloot also seems in agreement with informed consent regarding taking tissues and using them for research (especially in Henrietta’s case). In her afterword, she also makes an argument against the commercialization of tissues in some cases. Skloot says, “The thing is, people cant ‘think of [personally taking advantage of the capitalist nature of the tissue industry] on the front end’ unless they know their tissues might be valuable to researches in the first place,” (326). The point of her book is to show the injustice that Henrietta and the Lacks family faced, and voice her opinion on informed consent. Because of the reasons listed above, she seems to be in favor of informed consent when it comes to tissues being used for research and for commercialization. Rebecca Skloot however, does not exploit Henrietta or her family while trying to make this point. Subjects of books can be exploited by authors in many ways. For example, one way an author could exploit someone in his or her book would be by unfairly misrepresenting the subject or painting them in a bad light without their previous knowledge or review (this could also be considered libel, the malicious action of falsifying information, in many cases). Rebecca Skloot does not do this. Although she seems to take Henrietta’s side throughout the book, she gives backgrounds for the other subjects like George Gey. She describes Gey’s life as a scientific innovator on pages 38 through 39 of Immortal, but does not let this get in the way of her argument that what he did was wrong. SPJ.org, the online website for the Society of Professional Journalists, lists another way a subject of a book could be exploited by an author: by getting private information through “surreptitious methods” (“SPJ Code of Ethics, SPJ.org). Skloot makes a claim of honesty in the very beginning of book saying, “This is work of non-fiction. No names have been changed, no characters invented, no events fabricated,” (xii). Because Skloot followed these general guidelines, she avoided treating Henrietta, the Lacks family, or anyone else profiled in Immortal unethically. Similarly, while Skloot did gain recognition for the book, so did Henrietta Lacks and her family. As for the financial gain by Skloot through the publishing of Immortal, she has set up the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, which she donates some of the proceeds to. While the Lacks family doesn’t financially gain anything from Immortal, Skloot acknowledges the “few legal options” they have (328). It seems she is in favor of the Lacks family receiving financial compensation because she includes this in her afterword. Finally, it is obvious that Rebecca Skloot wrote Immortal with good intentions. In the prologue Skloot writes about first hearing about Henrietta and the HeLa cells in high school. She describes wanting to learn and write about Henrietta ever since then. The motive for her writing the book was not to exploit anyone, it was to research, learn, and educate others about Henrietta Lacks and her story. In her book Immortal, Rebecca Skloot tells the story of a woman and a family who were taken advantage of. Henrietta Lacks and the rest of the Lacks family were exploited by doctors, researchers, and the media and Skloot aimed to make it right. In a fair, non-exploitative way, Skloot makes a case for the Lacks family and explains what happened and how they were taken advantage of. The lack of informed consent and financial compensation, the racial and social injustice, and the exploitation by the media led Rebecca Skloot to get the true story out about Henrietta Lacks and the origin of the famous HeLa cells.
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