the immortal life of henrietta lacks quizlet

The immortal life of henrietta lacks quizlet trial#

I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever-bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world.

The immortal life of henrietta lacks quizlet trial#

My father gave consent, so his story is of course very different from Henrietta’s, but as a child with a father in a clinical trial I became obsessed with the question of who are the individuals behind the research and how does that impact them and their families? My next book returns to related ground: Animals, research, and ethics-another area of science where everyone benefits, and where it’s important to ask where to draw the line between the benefit of science and the impact on research subjects.

I imagine that’s because I was a kid watching her own parent be part of scientific research and experiencing the ups and downs of that: The hope that it will help, the fear of what might happen, and in my dad’s case, the pain of research going wrong. When I first heard about Henrietta I thought: I wonder if she had any kids and what they think about those cells. He enrolled in a clinical trial that had some ethical problems, and I watched it all. It was terrifying-no one knew what was wrong with him, and it left him permanently disabled. He lost his memory, he couldn’t move from a recliner in the living room.

Because of a viral infection, one day he went from being my healthy marathon-running dad to being incapacitated. When I was 16, the year I first learned about HeLa cells, my father got very sick.