Comment by jmcgough
5 years ago
> there's nothing personal or sentient in a strain of cancerous cells
There's countless trillions of her cells, with her DNA, in research labs all over the country. She never consented to that, and her family isn't happy about it. We can't know her wishes because she died of that cancer, but something like this would never pass an ethics review board today.
There is a long history of black americans being subjected to medical procedures or experiments without their consent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study), which makes this particularly problematic.
According to the HeLa Wikipedia entry, it was common at the time to use patients' cells without their consent. The fact that she was black doesn't seem to have much to do with it, and all she was subjected to was a routine biopsy. Doctors were just delighted that those cells kept duplicating, otherwise they'd have ended in the bin like everyone else's.
I do understand that discovering that one of your relatives' cancerous cells are still reproducing in laboratories after decades can be astounding and give a moment of pause. But it in the end it's for good, no one was harmed and nobody made an unjust fortune off it. The cells are barely human anyway, with 75 to 80 chromosomes and rapidly accumulating mutations. I don't see what all the fuss is about.