Who Is Henrietta Lacks Ethical?

Henrietta Lacks had a large, religious family who lived their entire life in poverty. She and her husband, Day, grew up together on a tobacco farm, and received little education as children. Day was a handworker and provided for the family as best he could; however, he was unfaithful to his wife on multiple occasions. Throughout their marriage, Day had affairs where he would pick up sexually transmitted infections and spread them to Henrietta. They began having children when Henrietta was only 14 years old, and they had a total of five children together. Henrietta loved her children and would have done anything for them. Their oldest daughter, Elise, had epilepsy and was nonverbal. When Elise became too much for Henrietta to handle on her own, the doctors convinced her to send Elise to Crownsville State Hospital, which was for the insane. “A bit of Henrietta died the day they sent Elise away, that losing her was worse than anything else that happened to her” (Skloot 45).
They viewed her as a test subject because her cells were so rare and special. The two main physicians that worked with Henrietta were Howard Jones and Richard TeLinde. Howard Jones was the first gynecologist to look at and biopsy Henrietta’s cervical tumor. Jones believed that radium would be the best form of treatment for Henrietta’s cancer as opposed to surgery. Richard TeLinde was an expert on cervical cancer for his time. He believed that cervical cancers were all carcinoma in situ before they became invasive carcinomas. It became his goal to prove this theory right. For his research, he began collecting cervical cancer cell samples from every patient he could, which would be considered unethical practice today. “TeLinde began collecting samples from any woman who happened to walk into Hopkins with cervical cancer. Including Henrietta” (Skloot