Are You Ready To Win?

Calling to ALL GBN STUDENTS, do you guys remember freshman year Biology? Probably not, cause if you’re an upperclassman, why would you? It’s at this point where our concept of time is just so out of wack that we can’t even remember what we had for breakfast last Monday (could be just me though). But if you’re a freshman that’s doing my game in the ERC, then welcome!

I’m here to talk to you guys of a cell. Well, a couple of cells, actually. No, wait; as of 2010, there are more than 50 million metric tons of HeLa cells in the world today, and the number will just keep on getting higher,

And higher,

And higher…

HeLa cells are cancerous cells from the 1960s that are the only ones in the world that can continuously divide if sufficient time and energy were spent on them.

The real question is, why exactly should we, as students of GBN, care about these cells and read about them as though they are extremely important to us? Although these cells have caused an immeasurable amount of breakthroughs in science, I wanted to take an ethical approach to the entire history behind it.

It’s pretty interesting how we as students are taught specifically of the scientific purposes of the HeLa cell, but not the person who brought us this gift in the first place. The book that tells of Henrietta Lacks’s story, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot, is a very powerful book that unveils the dark side of companies and the health systems back from the early 1930s all the way up to present day. Paul and Elder, the writers of “The Thinker’s Guide to Ethical Reasoning”, would definitely have not been pleased, whatsoever.

I want all of you to think about an event that occurred in the 1930s for a moment. Now, you tell me if the outcome seems ethical in any way:

“U.S Public Health Service researchers at Tuskegee Institute decided to study how syphilis killed, from infection to death. They recruited hundreds of African-American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful, and preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin could cure them” (50).

There are two acts that are “unethical in-and-of-themselves”, as Paul and Elder would have called them, in this situation. Racism (treating people unfairly due to their ethnicity or race) and Deceit (Fooling someone for personal gain or a certain outcome) are a nasty combination if used in this kind of way. During the 1930s, African Americans definitely did not have access to a good education, they were poor, and they for sure did not have any knowledge of diseases besides how it can kill you. They would do anything in order to live and get rid of it. The Tuskegee Institute, at that time, was only made up of White Americans that did not care for African American suffrage. In fact, they considered black people expendable, just like the white mindset during the hundreds of years of slavery they had to go through. “The research subjects didn’t ask questions… the researchers offered incentives: free physical exams, hot meals, and rides into town on clinic days, plus fifty-dollar burial stipends for their families when the men died… black people were ‘a notoriously syphilis-soaked race’” (50). Now, I know what you’re thinking: “This can definitely not happen anymore in today’s society.” Well, I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. Henrietta Lacks’s family, as of present day, still suffers from the monetization of her cells, and the multi-million dollar corporations that were created, due to the cell’s rare properties, still do not give any of the profits back to the ones that have it in their DNA… If your cells contributed to saving millions of lives, and other people were to have profited from them, how would you feel? At that time, the family couldn’t even fight back, because they were uneducated and didn’t know the importance of those cells. Henrietta’s husband, Day, didn’t even know what “cells” were until Rebecca Skloot explained to him what they actually were. African Americans were mistreated because of their lack of education and the event of the HeLa cells proves it. What makes this situation even more frustrating is that Johns Hopkins Hospital, the one that treated Henrietta for her cancer, wanted to see why exactly HeLa cells were the only cells that are considered “immortal” in the world. So, they tricked the family into thinking that the doctors needed to test their blood for possible signs of cancer within the family, but it was just to explore Henrietta’s family in order to find out more information about her cells. I don’t know about you, but I’d say their behavior was way over the line in terms of invasion of privacy, as well as blatant deceit coming from doctors that were supposed to help their patients, not just for personal gain.

If you finished reading this blog to the end, I applaud you! You’ve completed the game and are on the edge of receiving a prize! Please come talk to Michael Shen or me, and tell us one thing you learned from this blog, as well as this code word: HeLa. All of our information is written on the board in the ERC and feel free to reach us to claim a LARGE KING SIZED CANDY BAR!

Thank you for playing!

From, Christopher