Henrietta Lacks: Sued To Share Profits From His Cells

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Henrietta Lacks John Moore was a leukemia patient that died at the age of 56 years old. He had his spleen removed because with the infection the doctor was worried that it was going to explode. Once his spleen was removed the tissue was then used in research by Dr. David Golde a researcher for UCLA (John Moors, 56; Sued to Share Profits from His Cells). John was never told about the research being done on his tissues, he was just asked by Dr. Golde to return to the UCLA medical center for follow up checkups, where doctors would take blood every time and still never mentioned anything about research to John. John was asked to sign a consent form, to allow Dr. Golde to patent his research on John’s tissues, and this is when John finally got …show more content…

In 1951 Henrietta went to John Hopkins hospital to help her overcome the cancer with radiation treatments. While she was going in for treatments and checkups her doctor took some tissue from her tumor in her cervix and sent it to lab to be research, none of this she told Henrietta that he was doing. In lab Henrietta’s cell grew in culture and actually stayed alive, unlike any other cells they tried to culture. This cells were called “Immortal” because they grew so fast and to such a huge amount that they could separate them and send them to all different doctors for their own research. They were eventually named HeLa cells, from the first two letters of Henrietta and the first two letter of Lacks (History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places/ Smithsonian). HeLa cells were used in all kinds of research and cure many diseases. They were used in the first mission to space to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity, they were a very important part to finding the polio vaccine, they were used in cloning, gene mapping and also in vitro fertilization (History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places/ Smithsonian). Henrietta never had claim to her cell and what they did until 20 years after she died and finally, even after efforts to keep it hiding, in 1970s her real name started to leak out into the