The media neglected the negative impact on the family. Henrietta is reduced to the great advances within medicine, rather than for who she was and what she stood for in life. The media should have got permission to publish about her rather than guessing at the owner of the cells name to avoid falsely referring to the owner as HeLa or Helen Lane. The media often used the wrong name and referred to Henrietta as HeLa because no one knew who she was, they just knew about the extraordinary impact in the science world. The media continues this by rushing to publish the story of HeLa cells without asking permission from the family. In addition to the scientific community viewing Henrietta and her family as an abstraction, the media did as well. She had been worrying for years until Skloot finally told her there was no such test. Deborah was affected the most by the doctors who viewed her and her family as an abstraction. By lying to the family, the consequence doctors faced by treating the family as an abstraction installed fear into members of the family who did not know that there was no cancer test requiring blood. Knowing that the family would not give blood if it were for HeLa research, they were lied to so that they would believe the samples of blood were for cancer tests. The genetic markers would allow for them to see what cultures of cells had been contaminated by HeLa cells. A few doctors decided it would be best to get blood from the family members of Henrietta’s living relatives to identify and investigate genetic markers found in HeLa cells. This caused the scientists to start to look for markers for HeLa cells to distinguish and investigate if Gartler’s new found information was correct. When Stanley Gartler announced his shocking discovery that HeLa cells had contaminated many other cultures at the Second Decennial Review Conference on Cell Tissue and Organ Culture, he sent scientist into a panic that millions of dollars of research had been wasted. Not only was Henrietta viewed as an abstraction, but her family was as well. They shouldn’t just do it because they want to or it’s beneficial to them and not the patient. The patient is always the one to make the decisions for themselves, the doctor just explains what is needed to be done to help you. Especially, if the patient was not aware of anything going on. Henrietta deserved to be educated on the side effects of the treatment, a decision every human being deserves. The consequence of treating her this way violated her rights of being able to make the proper decision to receive the treatment. No human should have been exploited in the ways Henrietta was. The actions taken by her doctors were remarkably unfair. The scientific community had lost ‘Their sense of reality…Human beings were not human beings in their eyes. She should have been informed and by not doing so the doctors took for granted that she is a human with too. If she would have been informed this consequence, she most likely would not have received the treatment.
The doctors completely disregarded her choice whether to receive the surgery or not. Until that moment, Henrietta didn’t know that the treatments had left her infertile” (Skloot 47). “Toward the end of her treatments, Henrietta asked her doctor when she’d be better, so she could have another child. By not informing her that radium would make her infertile, the doctors showed again that they did not really care about what happened to her. At the very least the doctors should have had the decency to ask for permission to take the samples.Īnother example of Henrietta being viewed as an abstraction is when the doctors did not inform her of the side effects and negative consequences of the radium treatment she had received.
#Quotes from the immortal life of henrietta lacks license
Such consequences being that they should have had their medical license taken away and been revived from their position at John Hopkins. The doctors who treated Henrietta should have faced the consequences for their actions that caused so much distress to the family of Henrietta. The only form signed was to conduct emergency procedures if needed, the samples of her tissue were not any sort of emergency. Henrietta’s doctors should not have been able to use her tissue for research, let alone take samples of her tissue since no permission form was signed for the doctors to take samples from her. In doing so, a doctor would lose their medical license, be sued, and possibly imprisoned. To use patients as research subjects without permission from the patient is considered illegal in current medical practice and it violates so many rights a person has.
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