Book argument REVIEW

Alexis Molina
Ms. Denninger
AP Lang and Comp
4/17/17

Henrietta’s Cells

Fairness and consent play a big role in medicine. A patient must be treated fairly and must give consent in order for treatment or surgery to be done. If a patient chooses to not give consent, in any situation further actions are never taken or are considered. Consent was broken when Henrietta Lacks’ cells were taken away from her. Henrietta was an African American woman who was born in Maryland; she was a very hard-working tobacco farmer. Unfortunately in her 30s she was diagnosed with cervical cancer and then passed away in Hopkins hospital. During the time of her death no such laws were yet to be implemented into the system regarding consent from a patient. The doctors basically took advantage of that and stole a sample of henrietta's cells. The actions that were taken were form of misdoing, a misdoing that now would never be allowed during this time. The doctors should have never taken the cells away from Henrietta because no consent was given from her and her family was unaware of such actions during her death.

In the Book The immortal life of henrietta Lacks there are many arguments that are discussed, but the argument that is more central in the whole book relates to the stealing of henrietta's cells and how her family was never told about the actions that were taken from the doctors that had treated Henrietta at the time of her death. This story has a big discussion about the rights a person has and how people were given vaccines with henrietta cells without their knowledge. The birth of HeLa cells began when Doctor Gey (The doctor who treated Henrietta) found out that the sample of cells he acquired from Henrietta during a treatment were immortal. When Henrietta cells were siting in his lab Henrietta's cells were being to grow and replicate. Gey knew this was out of the ordinary. After Henrietta's death he was eager to get more samples of Henrietta's cells because he knew that the cells weren't like any other cell they were immortal. The book stated “Gey wanted samples from as many organs in her body as possible, to see if they’d grow like Hela (the cells that were taken at first).” This concluded that he was very eager to take more samples from Henrietta, but he needed permission from Henrietta's husband. Doctor Gey never got permission. During the 1950s “Though no law or code of ethic required doctors to ask permission before taking tissue from a living patient, the law made it very clear that performing an autopsy or removing tissue from the dead without permission was illegal” Without acknowledging consent Gey continued on what he had planned and called his assistant Mary to help collect samples from henrietta. More samples of Henrietta cells were then stolen. After all this occurred, not long after the death of Lacks “Planning began for a HeLa factory- a massive operation that would grow to produce trillions of HeLa cells each week. It was build for one reason: to help stop polio”. As Hela Grew through the United states “a virologist named Chest Southam had a frightening thought: what if Henrietta’s cancer cells could infect the scientists working on the?” He continued to work on this theory and He first began to inject a woman who had Leukemia with 5 million of Henrietta’s cells and also injected many of his other cancer patients telling them that it the injection that was given to them was to check their immune system. After seeing horrible results the book stated that “Within hours, the patient's forearms grew red and swollen. Five to ten days later, hard nodules began growing at the injection sites.…he removed them but the nodules always came”. He then continued and tested patients that were healthy, the ohio state inmates were the one of the many that volunteered. He proceeded with his test and The results were horrifying soon the prisoner's arms started to become infected, Tumors even grew on the inmate's arms. The effects were very similar to the patients that had cancer. Southam ended up injecting many people, “He also began injecting Henrietta's cells into every gynecologic surgery patient who came to Sloan-Kettering memorial Hospital”. Southam would say that “If he explained anything,he would simply said he was testing them for cancer”.