An Immortal Life

I recently read a book that absolutely fascinated me. The book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot left lingering questions of ethics in science and medical research, basic human morals, and immortality and the ability to live forever. This book has been haunting me, so maybe this is a good time to get some of these things off of my chest.

In the book Henrietta Lacks, a black woman born in Virginia on a tobacco farm, was diagnosed with and died from cervical cancer in 1951. Without her or her family knowing, while Henrietta was dying a brutally painful death, her cervix cells were being cultured in a lab located beneath Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Those cells were the first human tissue cells to be successfully cultured (usually referred to as HELA), and are still living today. In fact, they are used in almost every lab WORLDWIDE. Trillions, upon trillions of this woman's cell lines have been used for research. They have been used to develop drugs for cancer, MS, and cures for other diseases. They were used in the development of the polio vaccination.

So, how is it possible that not one of her five children, for most of their lives at least, were never able to afford health insurance? How is it that her children barely make it past fifty years old without dying, suffering from a stroke, or developing cancer? Her family did not even know they took and used Henrietta's cells until nearly forty years later?

It does not seem ethical or morally right to continue growing these cells and selling them all over the world for profits that are unimaginable over the past 60+ years, and Henrietta's family has never been able to scrape a dime together. Although the cells have done more work for medical research and had more success for medical research than any other cell line in history, the cells were stolen. Would she have wanted a part of her to used that way? Would she still want to be "living"?