Henrietta Lacks And Paternalism Essay

On 4 October 1951, Henrietta Lacks died. However, in death, she was transformed. Her cervical cancer cells, taken without her knowledge, would revolutionize the medical world by aiding in the development of gene mapping, cloning, and the polio vaccine (Skloot, 96). The method used by her Johns Hopkins doctors to gain access to her immortal cells was nothing short of unethical. Medical consent hardly existed in 1950, and doctors were able to take anything from patients they deemed valuable without having to tell their patients they did so. This philosophy sprouted from the idea that doctors had complete paternalism over their patients. Paternalism was specifically applied to the uneducated, poor, and the powerless. Black patients especially fell victim to unethical paternalism because they were both unable to go against a white person’s opinion and too uneducated to know better. Race and class both played an important role with what happened to Henrietta, but paternalism had the most profound effect. Under the belief of paternalism, Henrietta’s cells were …show more content…
After Day granted permission, Gey went on to perform the autopsy and kept samples of her bladder, bowel, kidney, etc. to use for the “HeLa factory” (Skloot, 93). Instead of viewing Henrietta as a person, Gey viewed her as a gold mine for medical advances. After he gained access to her cells, he became the director of what happened to them and chose to medically exploit them without giving Henrietta any acknowledgment. He had even released a false name, Helen Lane, to “throw journalists off the trail of Henrietta’s real identity” and by doing so he dehumanized the person behind the cells that transformed medicine (Lacks,