Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by FatPhil on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-wants-to-live-forever dept.

WHO honours Henrietta Lacks, whose cells changed medicine:

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has honoured Henrietta Lacks, recognising the world-changing legacy of a Black woman whose cancer cells have provided the basis for life-changing medical breakthroughs but were taken without her knowledge or consent.

Researchers took tissues from Lacks’s body when she sought treatment for cervical cancer at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in the 1950s, establishing the so-called HeLa cells that became the first ‘immortal line’ of human cells to divide indefinitely in a laboratory.

In recognising Henrietta Lacks, the WHO said it wanted to address a “historic wrong”, noting the global scientific community once hid her ethnicity and her real story.

“WHO acknowledges the importance of reckoning with past scientific injustices, and advancing racial equity in health and science,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “It’s also an opportunity to recognise women – particularly women of colour – who have made incredible but often unseen contributions to medical science.”

Lacks died of cervical cancer at the age of just 31 in October 1951 and her eldest son, 87-year-old Lawrence Lacks, received the award from the WHO at its headquarters in Geneva. He was accompanied by several of her grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and other family members.

Henrietta Lacks' story is a fascinating one, the intermixing of the medical and the social, and more. I first learnt about it from the 1997 BBC documentary Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh by Adam Curtis (my favourite documentary maker). I know Oprah was behind a dramatisation too a few years ago.


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:34PM (#1189364)

    we all know what that means.... she was a slut.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:37PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:37PM (#1189367)

    I can see the screeching posts about ESS JAY DUBYAS now! Woman? Black? Past injustice?

    STAHP CRAMMING YER POLITICS DOWN OUR THROATS! TRUMP PEEN ONLY!

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:45PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:45PM (#1189372)

      Listen here, son. My textbook says white men created civilization. Not just white men, but middle-aged Republican white men with radio talk shows. And everyone else refuses to pay them the proper respect. That's what the history book says.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:50PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:50PM (#1189375)

      GOLDEN PEEN?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @09:24PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @09:24PM (#1189403)

        Heard it was more of a mushroom risotto kinda deal, and I promptly regretted going online that day!

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:52PM (#1189377)

    Well, nobody's perfect.

  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by HammeredGlass on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:58PM (1 child)

    by HammeredGlass (12241) on Thursday October 21 2021, @08:58PM (#1189380)

    They enabled the Chinese to lie to the world about the coof and subsequently helped the world lose it's damn mind over it.

    • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @10:40PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @10:40PM (#1189426)

      Go to bed Glass you're hammered.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Thursday October 21 2021, @09:59PM (5 children)

    by Beryllium Sphere (r) (5062) on Thursday October 21 2021, @09:59PM (#1189420)

    "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" gives a lot of history and context. I recommend it highly.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @10:44PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @10:44PM (#1189428)

      Is the legal precedent that you don't own the genetic rights to any 'medical waste' created from your body.

      So any tissue, blood, etc harvested from you for normal lab testing may be sold by the lab and if useful could profit them quite handsomely while you suffer paying for the (mis)treatment they afforded you.

      That's the real story of Henrietta Lacks and is still being ignored in the shaping of public policy. Perhaps someone here would like to write the proposal that instates rights to our medical waste so that Henrietta's situation will never happen to any of us, african-american/black, european/white, arab, indian, asian, ever again.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 22 2021, @06:52AM (3 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 22 2021, @06:52AM (#1189520) Journal
        Conversely, a lot of peoples' lives have been saved by Lacks's tissue samples. How many people are you willing to kill for these alleged rights?
        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 22 2021, @07:42AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 22 2021, @07:42AM (#1189534)

          Because the alternative is a society where the wealthy or privileged can do whatever they want to the rest of us and we're powerless to effect real change.

          If you need other examples, look at Getty stealing/claiming copyright on other people's pictures. BMI and Company doing the same with people's audio on Youtube (Like Bjorne who in fact had licensed some of his media to artists who in turn were under BMI's umbrella), the Movie industry who has been found time and again violating copyrights to other people's copyrighted works in both media and non-media domains.

          Fundamentally if we don't have the right to choose how portions of OUR OWN BODIES are used, what rights *DO* we have?

          If we were living in a utopia I might agree with you Khallow, but in the societies we have today, without our right to be personally selfish, those more self and more well moneyed can take advantage of us, and the best we can hope for is some vague platitudes long after we're dead and indebted, while someone else made a buck off what amounts to our very being. The people who grew out Henrietta Lacks' cells made thousands or hundreds of thousands or more off her tissue, genetic likeness, etc all without a single cent going towards her or her next of kin. Of all the property rights one should have protected, the property right of their own body should be the most sacred in both a spiritual and legal sense. Without that, everything else in our societies is a literal fucking joke.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 22 2021, @02:36PM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 22 2021, @02:36PM (#1189608) Journal

            Fundamentally if we don't have the right to choose how portions of OUR OWN BODIES are used, what rights *DO* we have?

            Far more than enough rights to be a free person. Again, I think this is a mountain out of a molehill and a right that would kill a lot of people.

            In this story, the tissues in question would have been outright discarded - greatly reducing any claim Lacks had to the cell line. Second, consider the list of stuff that was discovered/accelerated [wikipedia.org] as a result of that cell line: polio vaccines, HPV vaccines, cancer studies, and results in genetics and biology in space freefall. For example, just pushing along the polio vaccine years ahead, which I think this did, would have reduced polio by millions of cases (even in 1988, polio still caused 350k cases in the wild) and nervous system damage from polio by thousands of cases.

        • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday October 22 2021, @01:46PM

          by Freeman (732) on Friday October 22 2021, @01:46PM (#1189594) Journal

          As many as it takes? Okay, maybe that's a bit callous. Still, the problem today isn't too many people fighting for our freedom. It's people straight-up giving it away. Hello "Patriot" Act! That was enacted 4 days shy of two decades ago!

          --
          Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @10:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @10:32PM (#1189425)

    ruh roh, deplorables triggered, activate the encyclopedia!!! deploy the cancerous windmills! NUKE THE SHITTICANE!

(1)