...Instructor: Henrietta (Loretta) Pleasant, born in August of 1920 in Roanoke, VA, was an African American woman who was raised by her grandfather in a small cabin on a plantation. At the age of 14, she gave birth to her first child, a son, followed by a daughter four years later. She married the father of her children, her first cousin David Lacks, shortly thereafter. After having moved to Maryland for work, the couple had three other children. The last, Joseph, was born in November of 1950, and two months later, in January of 1951, Henrietta went to the hospital with abnormal bleeding. A malignant tumor of her cervix was discovered, and was treated with radiation therapy, which was ultimately unsuccessful. Mrs. Lacks died on October 4, 1951, at the age of 31. During the course of her treatment for cervical cancer, a section of the tumor was removed and sent to the pathology lab. While being treated with radiation, two more samples (one of healthy tissue, and one of cancerous tissue) were also removed without Henrietta’s consent or knowledge. These cell samples were given to Dr. George Otto Gey, a scientific researcher who had spent years trying to figure out how to keep cells alive outside the human body. In Henrietta’s cells, he found his answer. The cell line grown from Henrietta Lack’s sample, now known simply as HeLa, has been utilized in research and medical labs throughout the world since the 1950s. The controversy The case of Henrietta Lacks is unique, in that...
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...changed her name to “Henrietta.” Her mother, Eliza Lacks Pleasant, who later died 4 years after giving birth to Henrietta. After her mother passed away Henrietta along with her father, Johnny Pleasant, and other siblings moved to a family home of Clover, Virginia. There in Clover where Henrietta met her husband Day, they grew up together and got married on April 10, 1941. She gave birth to five beautifully children, where she started to feel pain within her cervix after her fourth child. Henrietta Lacks was a beautiful mother and wife who loved her family, she was known to have a beautiful soul who care for everyone. Henrietta life all went downhill after she made a visit to doctors at Hopkins Hospital, where she found out that she had stage 1 cervix cancer. Mrs. Lacks made a visit to Hopkins Hospital where they ran multiple test, because she had been feeling pain within her cervix. During Mrs. Lacks visit Dr. TeLinde removed tissues from the lump inside her vagina, which her later passed...
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...Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks raises many ethical issues with one in particular surrounded around informed consent. Moore v. Regents of the University of California (1990) was very similar to Henrietta’s circumstance in that Moore’s removed blood and bodily fluids became a cell line patented for commercial use (Menikoff, 2011). The HeLa cells from Henrietta have become the “mother” of many inventions and served as a foundation of a number of medical advances, including the well-known polio vaccine, among others. Despite her contribution towards great inventions in the medical field, Henrietta’s family, like Mr. Moore, were not aware of such contribution leaving them to believe they were owed compensation. The same demand for compensation could also be seen by the Havasupai Indian tribe against Arizona State University who agreed to pay $700,000 to its members due to improperly using blood samples for genetic research (2010)....
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...Lloyd L. Cannedy, Ph.D. Book Review of “The Immortal Life of Henriettta Lack” Student: Abraham S Lincoln “Henrietta Lacks, a young black mother of five children, entered the colored ward of The Johns Hopkins Hospital to begin treatment for an extremely aggressive strain of cervical cancer. As she lay on the operating table, a sample of her cancerous cervical tissue was taken without her knowledge or consent and given to Dr. George Gey, the head of tissue research. Gey was conducting experiments in an attempt to create an immortal line of human cells that could be used in medical research. Those cells, he hoped, would allow scientists to unlock the mysteries of cancer, and eventually lead to a cure for the disease. Until this point, all of Gey’s attempts to grow a human cell line had ended in failure, but Henrietta’s cells were different; they never died.” (USF 2013-14 Common Reader, The immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Pg1) The cells, called HeLa, became one of the most important tools in medical research, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more. Less than a year after her initial diagnosis, Henrietta’s cancer was too much for her to bare, and the cancer took over her body. Because of her poverty she was buried in an unmarked grave on her family’s land. She was only thirty-one years old. Her family never knew, at that time that a portion small piece of Henrietta was still living, and that small piece would change the course of healthcare...
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...Informed consent has been practiced for decades in many areas of medicine, specifically, Clinical Research. The idea that “Informed consent is a basic policy in both ethics and law that physicians must honor” (Pg. 856). However, the article challenges the limitations of Informed consent and proposes new changes to further limit informed consent to help it adapt to the new emerging challenges in the field of research. Challenges such as, the adoption of complex technologies, such as next generation genetic sequencing, that have been proven to be difficult for patience to understand due to the science literacy, with the proposal to present information in a broader way that discloses complex information from patients. Furthermore, the article argues to the extend or in-depth of information the participant should receive, in which situations is ethically acceptable for researchers to waive or alter a patient's consent if necessary, and if advance notification is more sufficient than expressed consent. In addition, the author argues the level of consent that is required of a patient who is mentally incapable of consenting and the use of clinical date in future research without the need for further consent. Overall, the...
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...Who is Henrietta Lacks? “Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia, on August 1, 1920. No one knows how she became Henrietta.” (Skloot 18). Henrietta Lacks was a poor tobacco farmer who grew up in southern Virginia, that was also where her ancestors had been slaves. When Henrietta was 4 her mother died and her father took her and 9 of her siblings back to Clover Virginia to be divided and raised by family members. Henrietta ended up being raised by her grandfather Tommy Lacks, who was also raising another child by the name of David Lacks “Day” that was left by one of his many daughters. Like the majority of the Lack's family Day had dropped out of school in the 4th grade, and Henrietta dropped out after the 6th grade. “No one could have guessed she'd spend the rest of her life with Day—first as a cousin growing up in their...
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...Phoenix Ethical Principles Paper Henrietta Lacks was born on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia and she died due to complications of cervical cancer on October 4, 1951.She had been receiving treatment at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. At the hospital she was treated with radium tube inserts, which is said to be the standard treatment for cervical cancer in 1951. As a matter of routine, samples of her cervix were removed without permission. Henrietta was 31 years old when she died. In this time it was customary for doctors and researchers to remove cells from a person for testing. Likewise cells were taken from Henrietta. The problem was that the cells were taken from her body without her knowledge or consent. These cells were later used to form the HeLa cell. The HeLa cell has been used many times over in medical research since they were removed from the body of Henrietta Lacks. The lack of consent in this case shined a light on the legal and ethical issues involved in medical research. On October 4, 1951 Henrietta Lacks died, but unlike others her cells did not die. Samples of her cells were removed from her body without her permission. During this time doctors frequently removed cells from patients without their permission or consent. Informed consent did not come into practice until the late 1970s due to another controversial case, the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment of 1932-1972. The cells taken from Henrietta are known as the He-La cell line...
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...A main ethical issue raised in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is informed consent. During 1951 and 2009, when this book was pressed, health care workers were not legally required to obtain informed consent from their patients. Among those patients was Henrietta Lacks. As described in this book, her cells were taken without her permission and used in research around the world. Her story raised concern among the healthcare industry whether tissue researchers should be forced to get informed consent. The author, Rebecca Skloot, never specified her beliefs but can be assumed that she is for informed consent because of her experience around the Lacks family and the struggles they faced. If doctors want to gather tissues from patients strictly for research purposes, I do not believe they need to obtain...
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...HeLa Sravani Venkatayogi(G01056367) Henrietta Lacks is an African-American lady from Virginia. In 1951 Mrs. Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital. HeLa cells were derived from Mrs. Lacks cancerous cells. The tumor cells were unusually aggressive. They spread throughout her body, and she died at the age of 31. The doctor who treated her took the biopsy sample and sent it to Dr. Gey who was a researcher at Johns Hopkins. They cultivated the biopsy sample of Mrs. Lacks cancerous tissue in Laboratory without her knowledge. This was the first time scientists have observed cells which showed extensive growth, and they were immortal....
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...Do the Ends Ever Justify the Means? When I first heard about the book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", I thought it was just a reading assignment when I was in high school that I had to complete for a grade. As I began reading I became particularly interested in Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells. In "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", Rebecca Skloot talks about Henrietta Lacks and how her cells were taken without her permission, and how her family suffered afterwards. Skloot shows how medicine and science were seen back in the 1950's compared to now. Henrietta Lacks was a “mother of five who died of cervical cancer at only thirty-one years of age” (Gabbay). When she passed away the doctors at John Hopkins asked her husband, David Lacks, if they could do a biopsy on her. At first he said no, but he finally told them they could go ahead. The doctors never told him or his family that they were going to take her cells and keep them. Nor did they tell the family that Henrietta's cells were growing at an incredible rate and were being shipped and bought across the world. “The existence of a constantly reproducing, or immortal, line of cells would permit an abundance of research that had never before been possible” this is what caused the cells to be coveted by doctors and scientist all over the world (Gabbay). “I have always thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense”...
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...Reading “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot has identified various ethical issues. At the forefront is the disregard for patient consent when Henrietta Lacks cells are taken from her without her knowledge and sent to a lab where they grow and continuously sold to other labs all around the world. Informed consent is a patient right, however, at that time for a black woman no one thought twice about asking her permission or even informing her that samples were taken. Now looking back and think what occurred we cringe. Knowing that HeLa cells are in labs all around the world and were used in various vaccines and research without her permission is thoroughly chilling. “With Henrietta unconscious on the operating table… Wharton picked up a sharp knife and shaved two dime-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta’s cervix” (Skloot, 2010, 33). This vivid account of the cells being taken from Henrietta’s...
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...assey Barbeau 11/10/16 Mr. Mooney The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Essay Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway Books, 2010 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is Rebecca Skloot’s debut monograph, and she has only written one other monograph since. Skloot attended Colorado State University, and received her MFA from University of Pittsburgh. Though she has only written two monographs, Skloot is the author of hundreds of essays and stories published in various magazines. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebecca Skloot, tells the story of a young African American woman named Henrietta Lacks, who was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Though she was put through many painful medical treatments, Henrietta Lacks succumbed to her illness at the young age of 31. Unbeknown to Henrietta and her family, surgeons at John Hopkins Hospital had taken tissue from Lacks’ tumor, and sent the cells to be investigated by Dr. Gey, a researcher at John Hopkins Hospital. Despite the fact that many would consider this morally corrupt, informed consent had not yet materialized at this time, so there was no legal wrongdoing on the part of John Hopkins. Much to Dr. Gey’s surprise, Henrietta Lacks’ cells were growing astonishingly...
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...The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the story of a woman, her family and the moral dilemmas they influenced in the medical, and research world. Author Rebecca Skloot, often references the lack of legislation and regulation when conducting research with human “subjects,” which has brought up these dilemmas. As I read through the story of Henrietta Lacks, I struggled to understand how some saw what they put her and her family through as moral, despite most of it being completely legal. Not only is John Hopkins a well-known institute today, but also is where HeLa, Henrietta Lacks’ immortal cells, truly began. When taking these cells, there were no laws stating consent was needed. Human tissue was seen like trash; once it was out of the body, whoever collected it owned it. The doctors at Hopkins took the cells and sent them to a researcher named Dr. George Gey. Dr. Gey could do whatever he wanted to those sells with out consent or even knowledge of whom they belonged to....
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...Ethical Principals of Cancer Cell Research Brian Bocock PSY/305 March 9, 2015 Dr. Joycelynn Flowers-Ashton Ethical Principals of Cancer Cell Research October 4, 1951 has become one of the most memorable dates in the eyes of cancer cell researchers. On that date at Johns Hopkins hospital a destitute African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks passed away due to cervical cancer. Henrietta left behind her husband, David, and their four children. At only 31 years of age, this woman was going to be extremely influential in cancer research, and she had no idea. The worst part was neither did her family. Her cells were like no other cells ever seen and have provided for exceptional results for medical research since her passing, including the polio vaccine. However, the debate is over researchers taking her cells without her consent and made no immediate family members until 19 years later. Bringing this situation to the forefront of the implications and role ethics play in research today. Since the early 1970’s the story of Henrietta Lacks and her dominate cells has provided a great debate on a topic that will forever be in question, ethical principals. Dr. George Gey is the doctor that obtained the cells in order to find a cure for cancer. He was a great professional, I believe, that wanted nothing more than to find a cure for cancer, including profit. Because of this he wanted to keep Henrietta’s name private due to her passing and the understanding of a lawsuit by the...
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...A poverty-stricken, black southern tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks became one of the most valuable cells in life itself. Being stripped of having any knowledge of her beautiful yet shocking possession, scientists claimed them as their own and referred to them as “HeLa cells”. Not only did Henrietta not know about her immortal cells, she was also medically mistreated as well as her family. The Lacks family didn’t know about Henrietta’s cells by more than twenty-five years later meanwhile they’re still indigent. Medical assistance can jeopardize our entitlement to our own bodies which are absurd. Doctors have given ill-treatment to many other simple people like Henrietta. Patients like Henrietta have faced issues with informed consent because of doctors wanting to research and gain a profit. Racial discrimination plays a factor in the lack of empathy towards patients. In "The Immortal Life of...
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