George Otto Gey

In the novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, many situations arose due to bioethical and morality issues against the patients protection and privacy. Henrietta Lacks was a thirty-one year old, African American woman who developed cervical cancer during the 1950’s. However, samples of her normal and cancerous cells were stolen from here without consent or even knowledge. Tragically, Henrietta died shortly after many chemo treatments and the malignant cancer spread to every…

Gey’s assistant, Mary wasn't excited about Henrietta's cells. Nothing much was happening to those cells of Henrietta. Until about two days later, when they start to grow uncontrollably. Later in 1951, the cells became popular and everyone wanted them. Gey started sending HeLa cells to many different researchers around the world. Henrietta’s cancer cells spread rapidly in her body as they did in the lab. She had rounds of radiation and x-ray therapy, but she didn't survive her disease. She died…

cervical cancer. Although she is treated for the cancer, the treatment is executed much later than if she had been a white woman. During her first operation to treat the cancer, the surgeon removed two pieces of tissue from her cervix to give to George Gey, the head of tissue research at Johns Hopkins. The story unfolded after Henrietta died months later, and then after a couple decades the family began to discover the truth of her death, and the cells which…

Theme of Bioethics in Ball and Wolfe’s (2017) The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks For three decades, scientists had been looking for human cells that could be successfully multiplied outside the human body and much of their efforts failed until 1951, when doctors in the Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore collected a cancerous tissue sample from a colored woman, Henrietta Lacks, without her consent. Her tissue sample is significant as it allowed scientists to conduct tests on human cells…

Similar to other discoveries, evidence shows that discovery of the DNA structure was marred by controversies. Part of this controversy involved Rosalind Elsie Franklin, an X-ray crystallographer who was working on DNA with Maurice Wilkins at King’s College in London, England, between 1950 and 1953 (Sayre, 1975). She then moved to Birbeck College in London, where she worked on tobacco mosaic and poliovirus until her tragic death from cancer in 1958 at the age of thirty-seven. Following the…

Kheloud Daelam Ms. Ramsey Engl. 1A Class Time: 11:00-12:50 October, 2 2017 The HeLa Cells In the book “ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” , by Rebecca Skloot told the story of the first immortals humans cells alive that was taking out of black woman without her knowledge. I was very impressed learning as I was reading how an individual cell's changed the medical industry, however in the same time I was very disappointed about the fact that researches violated ethics. Henrietta Lacks is…

from Lacks. She was treated with radium by a man named George Gey. During this time Gey was performing some experiments at this hospital so he took a sample of Henrietta’s cells to research. He justified using the patients to by claiming it was payment for their free services. While nothing really separated Henrietta from the other cancerous patients her cells are still the ones remembered today. She was the first producer of immortal cells. Gey and his team had never been able to sustain…

stole her cells without consent used the cells to make some of the most astonishing research. This immortal act of Dr. Gey, was wrong, regardless of his curiosity. Even though, he was the head of tissue culture at John Hopkins and that was his main focus, taking her cells without permission and use them to make millions of dollars displayed an improper and unprofessional behavior. Dr. Gey vindictive actions lead him to discover the immortal cells, one of the most prestigious uncovering in…

In 1951, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took cell samples from a cancer patient without her knowledge or permission. This woman, Henrietta Lacks, has been a controversial topic ever since. For years, Dr. George Gey had been trying to make human cells divide and multiply continuously, and when the cell sample that had been taken from Mrs. Lacks began to do just that, he was understandably ecstatic. Having a limitless supply of living human cells allowed doctors to test how human cells reacted…

1. What was the chief injustice of the book? The chief injustice was the lack of informed consent and privacy violation. The scientific community was largely convinced that the HeLa cells had been donated. In reality, Henrietta Lacks, as a patient at John Hopkins, had not been informed that samples from her cervix were collected, nor had she been asked if she was interested in being a donor (p. 33). HeLa cells made large contributions to science, but they have exclusively benefitted companies…