newwavefeminism:

cunthorse:

I just read that link. That’s awful - I’d always assumed Lacks volunteered her cells.

nope! I blogged about this a while back, here’s my longer thoughts on Henrietta lacks

I read this book this past semester, it’s an important story to be told about race, class, gender and science in our country.

From it’s Amazon page:

From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive—even thrive—in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta’s family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution—and her cells’ strange survival—left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories? —Tom Nissley

Just to elaborate on the story

• At the time blacks were in separate hospital wards. She could only afford to be treated at the free clinic colored ward in her home town.
• The ward that treated her mis-diagnosed her and radiated her insides to the point that it was visible to her outsides.
• Because she was an uneducated African American woman, no one really bothered to explain to her what the treatments were doing to her
• After a while, the hospital refused to give her pain pills because she the pain she was in required too many. They also refused to give her bloog transfusions so she had to bring a truck full of family members each time she needed new blood.
• I want to impress upon the fact that the scientist who used her cells got them for free. and her cells created a multi million dollar industry. Her family, TO THIS DAY continues to live in poverty. Her daughter is quoted to say that while she isn’t looking for a handout or money, It’d be nice if her struggling family didn’t have to pay for the expensive medicine her mothers cells helped to create

The most aggravating part of this story is that somehow people, when given all these facts, still believe that race & class had nothing to do with how Lacks was treated. That we can’t be mad at the scientists. That medicine and testing is more important that human dignity. All i want to know is why did history try so hard to hide the fact that the cells that lead to a scientific breakthrough belong to a black woman. So many other people are glorified in history for their role in revolutionizing medicine. But nothing is said when one of the most important mothers of modern medicine happens to also be black…

no one likes asking the hard questions because we don’t like being honest about the answers…

If i haven’t spoiled the book for you already, go out and read it!