Friday, March 8, 2019

Do you think that Henrietta Lacks would have given her explicit consent to have a tissue sample used in medical research if she had been asked?

Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman whose tissue samples were taken without her knowledge or consent. At the time her samples were taken, in 1951, it was not current practice to request or receive consent from patients. George Otto Gey, a cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins Hospital where Lacks was treated, discovered an unusual trait about the cells in Lacks's tissue sample. Her cells reproduced at a faster rate and lived longer than cells from other samples, allowing for more research to be completed on her cells. This line of HeLa cells, as they were called, have been mass-produced and used in biomedical research around the world.
It is difficult to speculate on whether or not Henrietta would have given consent for her tissue samples to be taken. Since it was not current practice at the time, it would stand to reason that patients asked to donate samples probably would not have known of the future implications, positive or negative. As a cancer patient, Henrietta may have been willing to give consent if she had known that in doing so, she would be contributing to research that could prove beneficial to other cancer patients.

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