How Did Henrietta Lacks Use The Ethics Of Medical And Biological Research?

What would you do if a doctor took your cells without consent and shortly after, your cells went viral, being sent all over the world to millions of different scientists? Well, I can’t say that Henrietta Lacks lived through this, but I can say that her cells did. Bioethics, the ethics of medical and biological research, has been a controversial issue throughout the U.S. for years. Different laws have been formalized to help tame the fire on the topic of consent and mortality. In the year of 1951, Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer and had too many tumors to count inside her rotting body. While being treated at John Hopkins Hospital in 1951, she unknowingly donated her cells during treatment, beginning the first human cell line

However, millions of her cells were still alive and thriving. The cells from that tissue sample in her tumor the doctors took were mass-produced and have become priceless tools of medical research. Henrietta's cells are shipped around the world and have even been sent into space to study the effect of zero gravity on human cells. I believe that ethical responsibility, for medical researchers, includes having moral actions, consent, and believing in the concept of “a greater good.” First, I believe part of having ethical responsibility is having the appropriate moral actions. Skloot reminds the reader that patients are real people, not just tissue samples. She portrays that from this quote, “When I saw toenails … I nearly fainted. I thought, oh jeez, she’s a real person. I started imagining her sitting in the bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I’d never thought of it that way” (Skloot p.91). This quote was said by Mary, Dr. Wilber’s (a pathologist) assistant. She said this when Henrietta had just died and they were cutting and collecting samples from

This quote gives a very broad explanation of doing the opposite of the “greater good”; it says if everyone is doing it than it must be correct, even if it is unethical or immoral. The "everyone else is doing it" defense seemed to catch on in the medical field during that time, even if the concept of a greater good didn’t exist in their experiments. For example, if all of the scientists are injecting cancerous cells into people without the patient's knowledge, is that the greater good? In my opinion, no it is not, because even if one scientist does the “moral option,” in this equation, even if he gets rejected by other scientists for it, he did it for the “greater good” of humanity. Skloot also says, “‘You know other countries be buying her for twenty-five dollars, sometimes fifty? Her family didn't get no money out of it’” (Skloot 81). This quote is said by Cootie, Henrietta’s cousin. Although Cootie was incorrect, people paid much more for Henrietta's cells, he makes a point; people who never knew Henrietta are buying her cells, but her own family earned no money out of it, much less health care or even just some more respect. Nobody came