Henrietta Lacks Part Two

After our class discussion on March 27th, I have been thinking more and more about the ethics behind the Henrietta Lacks situation. With that being said, I was pleased to see that the beginning of Part Two contained some content that would help me to decide whether or not I found this practice to be completely unethical. Prior to our last class discussion, I did not realize that there is actually no law that requires doctors to ask permission from a patient or their family prior to taking tissue from a living patient. Now that I know that, I, personally, do not feel that it’s right to say that the doctor that took Henrietta’s cells was being unethical in his practice. He did not break any laws, leaving the question of whether or not this was ethical up to each individual person’s opinion. If you chose to think that this was not ethical, then I feel as though you should be placing your blame on the medical profession as a whole, not on this one, specific doctor that was just doing his job. Skloot then goes on to say that there is a law stating that taking cells from a dead person without permission is illegal and that Henrietta’s husband gave permission for her cells to be taken and used. He was even told that they would be running tests on these cells and using them for experimentation. While I do see the annoyance of the doctor’s repeatedly asking his permission and how he could end up just giving in because he did not want them to continue to ask, he still agreed to this. 

It was also mentioned in class how little recognition Henrietta received over her life-changing cells, but judging by the way that her family speaks about her, I would be willing to bet that Henrietta would be thrilled at the fact that she was helping others and making a difference. While I still do not know much about her, I get the vibe that she also would much rather have had that one and a half billion dollars given to cancer research than received it herself. And maybe I am not being as sympathetic here as I should be, but these were her cells - not her family’s cells. I do see that they clearly went through pain because of what their mother went through, but so have so many other families of patients that died of terminal illnesses.