Henrietta Lacks Research Paper

Words: 1249
Pages: 5

As an average American it is normal to get a flu shot or a routine vaccination and never wonder where it came from. Obviously somebody had to invent it and it had to have been studied for an extensive amount of time but that doesn’t cross the mind of the average American. A prime example of this is HeLa cells.
Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman born in Virginia in 1920. One day she went to the doctor because she felt a knot in her womb and soon after she learned that she had cancer. Henrietta went to John Hopkins Hospital because it was the only hospital that offered free segregated medical healthcare to blacks.
The procurement of the cells is the biggest ethical factor in the equation. Henrietta went into the Hopkins hospital to get her first radium treatment without any
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Scientists wanted to become the first to discover something new about genetic disorders. Scientists wanted cells, but didn’t want to put in the effort to grow them. Thus HeLa distribution factories started to open up. Scientists could access HeLa cells cheap and fast. The cells were being sold in mass quantities to anyone who wanted them. Soon everyone who needed the cells had more than what they needed so the distribution factories went out of business almost as soon as they started. This was beneficial to medical research though because scientists did not have to worry about messing up or failing on an experiment. They could use as many HeLa cells as they wanted and not worry about running out.
The only downfall of the distribution was it was hard to regulate exactly what everyone was doing with these cells. Many scientists were not publishing the work they were doing on the cells so it was impossible for Guy to know what had and had not been done to his cells. The distribution of the cells became out of control and it was impossible to figure out everyone who had received some of Henrietta’s