Henrietta Lacks Part 2

In part two of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the section that most stood out to me was the chapter on consent and morality. The main question that was asked from Chester Southam was, "What if Henrietta's cancer cells could infect the scientists working on them?" (Skloot, 127) Which led to Southam and Mandel injecting people with cancer cells without their consent. I believe that intentionally injecting people without their knowledge or consent is immoral. Consent is one of the most more important parts of ethics. Back when Henrietta had her cells stolen, the consent she gave was only for operational procedures, not taking the cells to culture and grow them. The book talks about the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital were Mandel would use patients for injecting cancerous cells. However, there were three doctors that knew it was unethical to inject the patients without their consent, because it reminded them of the Nazi trials on Jewish prisoners. (Skloot, 130-131) Also, because Mandel was using people from the JCDH, a few of the patients were unable to give consent due to the diseases they had. Nonetheless, Mandel had these patients injected with cancer cells. It astonishes me how excited doctors were to inject people with cancer cells and other diseases without the patients consent. Today consent is the first thing that happens when an experiment happens. Whereas, in the early and middle 1990s, people were experimented on by doctors whenever the doctors could get their hands on a patient. Consent is important in ethics, and doctors like Southam and Mandel used people for the advantage of science, but forgot that the injected were humans not experiments.