The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Part 1

At first glance, the book seems to be more about ethics and morality which is true. There are many moral and ethical questions that arise from reading part 1. The major ethical issue seen is the taking of Henrietta Lack's cells and using them for research without her consent and proper knowledge. Especially when her cells changed the scientific world. It was not just in the case of Henrietta Lacks that this occurred, "Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge. Many scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment. (30)" Today, because of new rules and regulations such as the Nuremberg Code this is unheard of and clearly not right. But in Henrietta's day, it becomes clear to me that patients then really had no say over his or her body and what was being done by doctors, especially black patients who were at the mercy of white doctors and then really had no say in what happened to their body. Without her consent and proper knowledge the treatments had a side effect that Henrietta was unaware of and would have wanted to prevent, "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. (47)"TeLinde continued to collect samples and did not properly receive consent or explain all the side effects of the treatment which prevented Henrietta from having more children.
As much as part 1 is about ethics and morality there is a theme of race. Skloot shows us that racism is still alive and a part of medicine. The institution of racism affected the relationships between white doctors and black patients who were treated unequally and like second class citizens. It also brought about unethical scientific research like we saw in the Tuskegee experiments. Race affected where Henrietta could receive treatment and a diagnosis that did not relate to syphillis or other sexual diseases, "David drove Henrietta nearly twenty miles to get [to Hopkins], not because they preferred it, but because it was the only major hospital for miles that treated black patients. This was the era of Jim Crow—when black people showed up at white-only hospitals, the staff was likely to send them away, even it if meant they might die in the parking lot. (15)" There were no ethical conducts back then, it all relied on the racial views of the medical professionals. If Henrietta was white maybe it would have been different but, " There's no way of knowing whether or how Henrietta's treatment would have differed if she'd been white. According to Howard Jones, Henrietta got the same care any white patient would have; the biopsy, the radium treatment, and radiation were all standard for the day. But several studies have shown that black patients were treated and hospitalized at later stages of their illnesses than white patients. And once hospitalized, they got fewer pain medications, and had higher mortality rates. (64)" It is impossible to say that if she were white she would have gotten better treatment or have been cured but maybe she would have been given a choice in that treatment and had a say in her body.