Lacks Case Study Essay

At Hopkins one of researchers who worked on Lack’s case was Dr. George Gey, a leader in cancer tissue culture. In order to study cancer or any other cell disease, there must be cells to study. The problem is that human cells can survive only for a short time out of the body, which makes them useless for most experiments. The truth was Dr. Gey had been doing research for decades, trying to prove the then controversial idea that growing cell from normal cervical tissue. However, the idea to grow the “malignant” cells outside the body had proved impossible. Luckily, When Gey tested Lack’s cells, he noticed something remarkable. Unlike ordinary human cells, they did not die in the laboratory. They reproduced aggressively and thrived under laboratory …show more content…
At this time, without informing to the Lacks’ Family, Dr. Gey announced on national television that he had produced from Ms. Lacks’ tumor a line of cells that propagated as no other cells ever had before. He called them HeLa’ cells in her honor, and showed a vial of the cells to the television audience. According the Henrietta cell site, it states that “Even when Gey found out that the owner of the immortal cell is Henrietta, he did not publicly announce her name. It is because Gey did not want to give credit to Henrietta and avoid quarrel from Henrietta’s family.” There are one thing that David lacks Sir, who is her husband, insisted “that when his wife died, the only procedure for which he gave the doctors at Johns Hopkins permission was an autopsy,” “An Unsung Hero” book writes. Honestly, before the civil rights of the nineteen sixties, much of Black folks are born expecting segregation. That time clearly was one of blackness times of the American society. There are so many question about why a leader of a hospital who got very high educated like Dr. Gey acted like an uneducated person. In “African American Children”, Shirley A. hill uses the phrase “racial socialization” to describe how American society defined who black people are (103). Back to nineteen fifties, black people prepared “their children for the realities of being Black in America” (104). What are realities? Hill states “they are socially defined by parents based on their own personal experiences and their education, income, religious beliefs and expectation for their children” (106). There was a rule on that time that “blacks will never achieve social and economic equality with whites” (106). Truly, Dr. Gey easily escaped from the legal punishment for stealing and selling Henrietta’s cell because there are no law