The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, her family, and researchers who have exploited her cell line under the name of advance in medical research. In 1951, when Henrietta Lacks was treated for cervical cancer at John’s Hopkin hospital, a physician collected her cervical cancer cells and handed to a researcher without proper process of informed consent. In a research lab, her cancer cells were harvested and disseminated to other labs. Henrietta’s cancer cells become the first immortal human cell line and became widely used for scientific research. When her cell lines were sold by billions throughout the entire country and HeLa cells became popular research tools in the scientific community,

This experiment, conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, was intent to study the natural progression of syphilis in African American male population. The study participants voluntarily participated in the study but the researchers did not properly inform the participants on the availability of treatment or the risks of the disease if untreated. To make the matter worse, the participants were deliberately led to believe that they were receiving treatment from the Public Health Service for free, while the actual treatment was being withheld to achieve the purpose of the research. In today’s point of view, it is surprising that even the federal agency did not respect the dignity of human rights for the sake of research. In Henrietta’s era, even the federal agency did not follow the proper informed consent procedure, and a prestigious institution like John’s Hopkins did not have any regulations or office such as Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to govern their research protocols to protect human subjects and their rights. Later in 1964, the World Medical Association issued the Declaration of Helsinki which is a set of ethical principles on human subject biomedical studies. Despite its contribution as the cornerstone documentation to human research ethics, just like Nuremberg Code, it was not regulated under the international law, and many biomedical experiments had kept conducting unethical human