Henrietta Lacks Ethical Issues

When one seeks the help of a doctor, they automatically assume nothing can go wrong after all it is about the patient. However, what many may not know is the illegal piracy of human tissues and genetic material. This terrible activity has been going on for centuries and people have done some but not enough to condemn it. It violates the physical body right which are possessed by each individual person and that person only. In the medical community, researchers and scientists have taken patients for granted due to them being an ideal candidate for their research relying on their belief it is in the patients’ best interest and later if their experiment was successful thus profiting from it at the end leaving the candidate’s name unknown.

Scientist

One important contributor to the modern and vast discovery of research is Henrietta Lacks. Her contribution doesn’t play much of a role as her informal consent being reprimanded. Since the beginning, the infamous book written about her states, “They Gey’s wanted to grow the human equivalent- they didn’t care what kind of tissue they used, as long as it came from a person.” (Skloot 30). Although in the 1950’s everyone was oblivious to the actions of unjust cell culture and research, a minority were aware of the consequences however they failed to act upon it. Because of this many researchers took this as an easy way to access all of the patient’s information without consent intending it would benefit both sides. “Southam… was withholding information because patients might have refused to participate in his study if they’d known what he was injecting” ( Skloot 130). Ethics plays a long way in knowledge and moral conscious. Not only does it balance out the set of disciplinary concepts, it also sets the intellectual discipline. In the book, the scientist Southam has a goal of manipulating the cell structure of a cancer cell hoping it will unravel how people get

Henrietta Lacks was an ordinary thirty-one-year-old African American woman who happened to acquire cervical cancer. Although cervical cancer was common back in the day, the fact that she was black gave her less of an importance. “David drove Henrietta nearly twenty miles to get [to Hopkins], not because they preferred it, but because it was the only major hospital for miles that treated black patients. This was the era of Jim Crow—when black people showed up at white-only hospitals, the staff was likely to send them away, even it if meant they might die in the parking lot” (Skloot 15). Skloot shows us that the era of industrialized discrimination was not too long ago. Although segregation is illegal today, in 1951 almost everything was divided into two: one for the blacks and one for the whites. Despite the fact that there wasn’t any concrete evidence to prove Lacks was treated differently since she was given everything to relieve her pain, it was still the time of racism in the African American community. “The researchers as Tuskegee Institute decided to study how syphilis killed, from infection to death. They recruited hundreds of African American men with syphilis, then watched them die, painful, and preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin cure them…The researchers chose black subjects because they, like many whites at the time,