government had issued patents relating to the use of about 20 percent of known human genes, including genes for Alzheimer’s, asthma, colon cancer, and, most famously, breast cancer. As of 2005-the most recent year figures were available-the U.S. “Them doctors never said nuthin about keeping her alive in no tubes or growin no cells.“Gene patents are the point of greatest concern in the debate over ownership of human biological materials, and how that ownership might interfere with science. Nothin else,” Lacks’ husband told Skloot many years later. When Lacks died, six months after her initial biopsy, Hopkins was legally required to request permission for an autopsy or tissue removal. Myth and fact blended in stories of body-snatching and dodgy human experimentation.
Trust of Johns Hopkins and other hospitals in the 1950s was so low among the African-American community that there’s a decent chance Henrietta Lacks would have declined to donate her cells had she been asked. In 2004, the tribe sued the university for $50 million, a case that continues to bounce around the courts. They learned about this nondiabetes research only a decade later. But the blood samples were soon used for research on schizophrenia, inbreeding, and evolutionary genetics-uses to which the tribe objected and had not consented. In the early 1990s, members of the Havasupai Tribe donated blood to Arizona State University researchers for studies on diabetes, which was becoming increasingly common within the tribe. Other recent examples demonstrate problems with getting the right kind of consent. Few Texans outside the health department knew about the practice until the Austin American-Statesman published details of the program last February. As with Lacks’ case, the samples were initially used for diagnosis and so could be legally repurposed for any type of research thereafter. How they are handled and how long they are kept varies greatly, but the vast majority of states don’t require informed consent. Every state in the nation collects dried blood spots from newborns to screen for birth defects. From 2002 until last year, the Texas state health department obtained blood samples from every infant and stored them indefinitely for potential medical research, without parental consent. Less shocking yet far more common are the lack of consent requirements for in vitro research. “Asked whether he thought he should have asked for a review board, he said: ‘Not even remotely.’ ” Or see the much-criticized practice in Canada of having medical students practice pelvic examinations on unconscious women who have just been through surgery-without the patients’ consent. In defending himself to the Wall Street Journal in December 2009, the doctor pointed to the frequency of such unannounced device-tweaking. Take, for instance, accusations that a prominent Northwestern University surgeon implanted a modified heart-valve device, rather than the standard version, in more than 150 patients without notifying them of the changes. Over the years, Lacks’ cells have been sold for $10 to as much as $10,000 a vial-and her chronically impoverished family has received nothing.ĭisregard for something so basic as consent is still disturbingly common. The value of the so-called HeLa cell line that sprung from Lacks’ tumor is incalculable: Its resilience and rapid growth made it ideal for testing Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, developing numerous cancer drugs, studying basic cellular processes, and honing experimental methods now standard in biology.
#The immortal life of henrietta lacks quotes series
Those cells became the first human tissue to replicate indefinitely in test tubes, launching a series of revolutions in medicine. After her surgery, Lacks’ surgeon passed a thin disc of her cancerous cells to Gey’s lab. She may have been a regular patient, but she was about to achieve an odd form of immortality in the medical world.Īt the time, Hopkins’ head of tissue culture research, George Gey, was refining the art of sustaining cells in stews of placental blood, chicken plasma, and other savory ingredients.
The 31-year-old had traveled 20 miles to Hopkins, the nearest major hospital that would treat black patients. In February1951, Henrietta Lacks lay unconscious, her feet in stirrups, at Johns Hopkins Hospital as doctors examined the particularly aggressive cervical cancer that would soon kill her.
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