Social Media and overthinking

Henrietta Lacks and how unethical is too unethical?

One woman changed the face of science, but nobody knows her name. Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman living in Queens, California in the mid 1940s, struggling with extreme poverty and the prospect of raising the five children she had had with her cousin, Day. It was not actually until her death, in 1951, that she participated in one of the largest discoveries of modern-day science.

When Lacks was only 31 years old, she developed a severe case of cervical cancer which spread throughout her entire body and eventually lead to her death later that year. At the time of her diagnosis, George Gey, a professor at John Hopkins Hospital, was attempting to culture the first line of immortal cells which would survive when separated from the human body. This would give the world the possibility to test vaccines, medicines, the effect of viruses, bacteria and almost anything else on the human body; it would revolutionise contemporary science.

On the surface, the prospect of the development of cell cultures and testing procedures seems to be a predominantly positive one. The decrease in animal testing, increase in medicines and overall, a reduction in human suffering are encouraging outcomes which we would see if Gey’s discovery ever amounted to anything. In 1951, George Gey understood these vast potential impacts for people in the future and began to disregard the ill-effects it had on people in the present day; he would take test samples from black African American patients on the John Hopkins hospital wards without their consent or knowledge and use them in his own research. Henrietta Lacks was one of these patients. Gey felt that because these black patients were receiving free health care, their ‘donation’ constituted their due payment.

At the time, in Baltimore, segregation was law and therefore racism was not contested very much. The consent and ownership of tissues was, and still is, a highly debated topic; the law does not now (and did not then) have a clear-cut definition of what is right and wrong in this field, even if morally there seems to be an obvious answer. Due to this, many other unjust trials were allowed to commence, the most notable being the ‘Tuskegee study’ of 1932, performed to observe ‘the effect of Syphilis on the body when left untreated’. Within this trial 600 black men (399 with syphilis and 201 without) were informed that they were to be treated for ‘bad blood’, a term which encompassed syphilis, fatigue, anaemia and many other ailments. In fact, the treatments they received were too weak or even void of the necessary drugs. Even worse, the doctors on the trial were secretly telling other medics to withhold life-saving treatments from their test subjects should they request them. It was not until the study was finally discovered by the American government and forcefully disbanded in 1972 that they confirmed the deaths of 128 of the men and the infection of 40 of their wives. As well as this, 19 of the test subjects’ children acquired congenital syphilis; all of which could have been avoided through a prescription of penicillin.

These medical abuses are not just stories of the past. In 2007, the Retained Organs Inquiry investigated a series of cases on the removal of recently deceased babies’ organs. This included brains, livers, and hearts which had been removed without the knowledge or consent of the parents, for the purposes of research and education. The parents were told that their children’s bodies were buried when in fact most of their parts were simply incinerated.

14

It was whilst Henrietta was suffering on her death bed in John Hopkins hospital that George Gey managed to successfully get her cells to replicate in his carefully formulated culture. This had been attempted in his lab multiple times with ever dwindling success; the cells would usually die within a few hours. However, Henrietta Lacks’ cells, branded HeLa, thrived and replicated at tumultuous speeds. Nobody had achieved this level of replication before; the closest was thought to be the growth of the ‘Immortal chicken heart’ by suspected FrenchNazi Alexis Carell in 1912. However, shortly after his death, his research was found to be a ruse and the cells said to be immortal were actually being replenished regularly with new cells once they died! Immediately, George Gey began shipping HeLa cultures all over the world with primarily little monetary gain for himself. Over the years, HeLa cells were discovered to grow in substantial amounts and at extremely low costs. They were used to test the effect on the body of everything; from vitamins, steroids, and hormones to chemotherapy drugs (the malignant nature of HeLa being extremely helpful for this). One of the major contributions of HeLa to society was its assistance in the development of the Salk vaccine to fight against the Poliovirus. Before the discovery of HeLa, monkeys were being used as test subjects for the Salk vaccine and other like trials. However, this practice became increasingly more expensive and, not to mention, it was extremely unethical. As it turned out, HeLa cells were even more susceptible to the Poliovirus than the monkey cells, making them more useful, affordable, and accessible for this research. In addition to this, the Poliovirus studies were eventually conducted in the HeLa distribution centre in Tuskegee, built specifically to produce HeLa cells in culture. This was the location of one of the most prestigious black universities at the time and the research would provide thousands of jobs for young black scientists, as well as excessive funding to support their scientific research. Other interesting uses of HeLa were in the testing of the effects of atomic bombs on humans and the identification of a possible cancerous cell line within a genome.

The consequence of George Gey’s primarily unethical actions have resulted in great medical advancements as well as the increase of opportunities for previously underrepresented black scientists. Although, for years, nobody knew Henrietta’s name; medical journals would print the donor’s name as Helen Lane or would even neglect to mention it at all. All the while, her family was still living in poverty, unable to secure health insurance, whilst their mother’s cells were being sold for thousands of pounds per vial. I want to leave you asking yourselves: did the ends justify the means? Can we simply forgive the injustice done to Henrietta and the Lacks family due to the rewards which society has reaped from it, and is this selective forgiveness becoming an unwelcome trend in scientific discovery?

- Helvetica H T (L6)