Essay --

Before 1951, the capability of growing cells resulting from animal tissue remained indefinable. The cells would die before they could reproduce for research. This changed in 1951 when a woman by the name of Henrietta Lacks was biopsied because of a tumor. She later passed away due to her cancer. The cells were taken from her cervical cancer cells and now thrive on their own. While the cells of Henrietta Lacks became commercialized, the Lacks family was forced to live without healthcare. They lived their lives in poverty. Henrietta Lacks' story is about her involvement to medical research. The problem with all of this is she never gave the doctor permission to take her cells. Doctor George Otto Gey took them from her cervix. She then died from her cancer. I believe this was wrong; you should have the right to know if a doctor took a part of your body. Henrietta’s family didn’t find out about what Gey had done for a while after it happened. I think they deserve some compensation for the HeLa cells; they lived in poverty, even though Henrietta’s cells were making so many advances in science. They shouldn’t be given all of the profit because they were not doing any of the work to make the advances, but a little something should be given in honor of the doctor taking the cells. There has also been a theory for racial minorities. Henrietta Lacks was black and some people believed that what had happened to her may have happened to many other people. If doctors took samples of her body, they would probably do it to anyone else. In the '50s I don’t think they were necessarily doing it because she was black, they did it to everyone, black or white. In the 70s, when scientists went back to her children to do research on them. That's the ... ...ical cancer caused by this virus. Studying her cells allowed them to see how this virus led to cancer and found that the virus inserts DNA into the host. Through this knowledge they were able to create a vaccine that blocks the HPV DNA. This is a prevention method. Polio is a viral disease that affects the nerves, it leads to possible paralysis. HeLa cells led to a vaccine that is about 90% effective. Henrietta went to johns Hopkins and today polio is a rare disease. It is all thanks to the cells of Henrietta. Due to a tragic mistake made while mixing HeLa cells in research, scientists were able to finally get a count of how many chromosomes human cells were supposed to contain. This mistake allowed chromosomes to swell and be clearly visible compared to the clumped appearance they normally have. Using this scientists were able to start diagnosing genetic disorders.