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Why Is Henrietta Lacks Unethical

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Henrietta lack’s mother died when she was four. Henrietta married Day at the age of 14, and had five children, and lived a life of poverty. She lived in poverty in Virginia with her 5 children. Henrietta Lacks was born on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia. Lacks died of cervical cancer on October 4, 1951, at age 31. Cells harvested from her body without her knowledge formed the HeLa cell line. Hinretta’s cells have been researched in every manner imaginable since that time. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is much more than a book about the Lacks family. It is also an atrocity that scientists disregarded the basic human rights any human should have, just for the name of science. “Scientist do not like to think of HeLa cells as and actual part of a human who had a life and emotions. So, they gave the cells the name HeLa to dehumanize them. A researcher named Robert Stevenson …show more content…
Howard Jones took a biopsy from Henrietta and got the test results quite quickly. The news was not great: stage I cancer of the cervix, but Henrietta was told there could be a positive aspect. Richard Wesley TeLinde, the boss of Henrietta's doctor, Howard Jones. TeLinde argued that cervical carcinoma in situ (Henrietta's diagnosis), considered a "non-invasive" cancer, can still metastasize, or spread, becoming something more serious if not treated (Shmoop). Not everyone was convinced. The pap smear was a new technology and was only introduced ten years prior to the diagnosis of Henrietta’s cervical cancer. It still wasn't being used frequently or properly to diagnose abnormal cervical cells (Shmoop). TeLinde decided to prove his theory; with Hopkins being a place where many poor black families were treated, he figured the hunting ground was ripe with poor unintelligent test subjects. The medical experiments

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