Henrietta Lacks Ethical Issues

During the time of the experimentation of Henrietta Lacks cells, white people were seen as superior to blacks and the only hospital that were allowed to care for African Americans was John Hopkins Hospital. Even though this was the only hospital black people still weren’t given the same care as whites. Henrietta had come from a black community, so she and her family were looked down on in the health care community. Henrietta had originally gone to the doctor because she had a lump in her cervix and she decided that it was time for her to get it checked out, the doctors had found out that it was cancerous and she had to go through multiple treatments. According to Skloot (2011), one of the doctors was Richard Telinde and he had taken a sample of her tumor from her cervix and put it in a petri dish, without her knowing and took it to the lab to grow human cells for experimentation.
This situation regards many ethical issues, how was it fair for them to take her cells and grow them without her consent, because there weren’t technically any laws back then to stop these doctors from doing this. Henrietta’s cells were the first of TeLinde’s many attempts to grow human