The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Blog#2(choice 1)

             In the second part of the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebecca Skloot, the author mainly focuses on the ethical background of research. Research is a very difficult thing to do especially for biology related fields because their main focus is to better understand the human body. However, in order to understand the human body and how it works against certain diseases, viruses, and bacteria, scientist have to test their hypothesis on humans. In today’s society research, medicine, and science it self is extremely restricted due to the fact that the health of a person has now become a business. The HeLa cells that were taken from Henrietta are the only human tissue that scientist can use to actually find more information about human beings. The fact that scientist took those cells from Henrietta without her or her family knowing is completely unethical, but without it medicine would have not gotten very far. Sadly, this topic is very controversial because even though Henrietta died due to her malignant tumor her cells from that tumor have helped millions of people.

            Furthermore, David Korn from Harvard University simply states that everybody is obligated to willingly give samples of their tissue to help for the sake of others. That statement is very true and I agree with Korn strongly because this can only benefit mankind and research. However, due to past events such as Nuremberg trials where scientist go to extremes to gain knowledge about the human body, such as cutting a body wide open while the patient is still alive to study organ function, ruined research for today’s scientist. After this horrific event the field of medicine also changed, because restrictions were placed upon the doctor’s ability to treat their patients to the best of their abilities. Hospitals and research have mainly focused of profit so they never want to be risky or it can really hurt their institution. It is exposed in media often on how doctors are limited by laws and also how the system works in the hospital. Shows such as house, grey’s anatomy, and scrubs portrays how hospitals segregate people’s quality of treatment through class, basically the richer the person the better the treatment. Also another way doctors are limited in doing their job is getting the permission of a patient to perform a procedure even when they are close to dying. Unfortunately, it is kind of sad that a person’s life is put on the line because of money.  

It is mainly the same with research because researchers are so restricted with their subjects. Researchers are only able to test their hypothesis with other organisms rather than humans. HeLa cells are the only human based subjects they can test, I think that it is ethically wrong to take cells from other people without them knowing, or performing test on patients without them knowing. I think that David Korn brings up a good point that people should give up their cells if it is going to help a great amount of people. However, I disagree with his statement that it benefits everyone, because it doesn’t always happen that way. A great example is Henrietta’s situation where medicine flourished but her family stayed very poor even with Henrietta’s contribution to their success. Furthermore, another downside of having a profit based health care in terms of research is that research based treatments are very expensive. Although they work extremely well compared to regular treatments not everyone can afford the treatment so it doesn’t benefit a lot of people. For example, Aids has been a serious virus these couple of years but researcher found a treatment that can potentially prevent the aids virus from spreading. They do this by using reverse transcriptase inhibitors which prevents the virus’ reverse transcriptase enzyme from working and eventually keeps mRNA from being converted into cDNA thus not allowing the virus to multiply. This type of treatment is one of many and they cost a great amount of money, the treatment is very unaffordable by the middle and lower class however it is cheap change for the high class individuals such as Ervin Magic Johnson. This is very ethically incorrect because research based finding are suppose to help everybody not just the high elites.