Rebecca Skloot

radiation, cancer, viruses, and helped lead to advances in cloning and gene mapping. These cells came from one terminally ill woman, Henrietta Lack, who didn’t even know they had been taken from her until she was on her death bed. The author, Rebecca Skloot details the origin and use of the HeLa cell line in her book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta lacks”. Henrietta was a black woman with a little more than that of an elementary education. She had never even taken a science class, so when she…

An ethical Issue of Right to Self-Determination In the profession of nursing, we as nurses must maintain the integrity, and respect the rights of human subjects. As a nurse, we must understand the ethical principles to promote patient safety, quality of care and avoid errors. One of the protecting human subject’s rights includes the right to self- determination. According to Burns and Grove (2011) “The right to self- determination is based on the ethical principle of respect for persons, and it…

Every human being has different views on what is ethical and what is not, however as a society there is a general understanding of what is considered ethical. This “general understanding” is constantly being molded to conform to the changes in society. The 1950s was a time where there was still a great deal of racism against blacks in the United States. For that reason, mistreatment of African Americans wasn’t considered unethical at the time, it was simply considered the norm. The Jim Crow laws…