The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Ethics

How would you feel if your mother’s cells changed the world of science forever? The book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”by Rebecca Skloot is a book filled with the discoveries of medical mysteries all throughout the 1900’s.The book is about a woman named Henrietta Lacks who died due to Cervical cancer being improperly treated. Along her cancer journey, her cells were taken from her without her consent. Later, scientists came to the realization that her cells didn’t die like the average person’s did, little did they know they were dealing with something that would change the medical field forever. I will be talking about the ethics covered in the book, laws against the consent of conducting research, and the science behind it all. First,

“They recruited hundreds of African American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful, preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin could cure them” (Skloot 50). The quote connects to my claim by talking about how when scientists were experimenting on men with syphilis to find a cure (their goal) that they continued to wait and watched them die, already knowing what could cure them, which is an example of wrong and incomplete conduct. “He repeated this process with about a dozen other cancer patients. He told them he was testing their immune systems; he said nothing about injecting them with someone else's malignant cells” (Skloot 127-128). This passage is talking about how scientists took innocent people and used them as their experiment testers without their knowledge as well as lying to them about what they were actually doing. Being in charge of medical procedures that are being done on hundreds of people is an important role to be, that being said, you should take care of your patients and give them the best possible treatments they can be provided

“Toward the end of her treatments, Henrietta asked her doctor when she’d be better so she could have another child. Until that moment Henrietta didn't know that the treatments had left her infertile” (Skloot 47). This passage connects to my claim by showing how Henrietta's doctors didn’t tell her a crucial effect, that the tests being done would limit her ability to have children which was a very important factor to Henrietta. “The plan was that Mandel would have doctors on his staff inject 22 CDH patients with cancer cells for Southam. But when he instructed the staff to give the injections without telling the patients the contained cancer cells 3 young Jewish doctors refused, saying they wouldn’t conduct research on patients without their consent” (Skloot 130). The evidence proves that my claim is accurate by showing how some of the doctors refused to conduct research on their patients without their knowledge of what was really going to be being done to them as well as the possible outcome of the injection. In conclusion, performing research with questionable conduct being involved, on patients who are unaware or unable to question the procedure should be banned from the medical and scientific