Money Grows on…People

In the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the idea of ignoring someone’s privacy for personal benefit becomes a big issue as her cells were cultured without her consent, then sold and mass produced, making big pharmaceuticals a lot of money. On the contrary, Henrietta’s family still remains poor, not being able to afford health care. 

Today, we will explore how the American people are exploited by corrupt systems that violates the people’s privacy for personal benefit, both in the medical field, and the law.

Henrietta Lacks

“Henrietta’s cells helped launch the fledgling field of virology…researchers around the world made several important scientific advances in quick succession (98).”

Through HeLa cells, doctors were able to conduct research they had never done before and advance further in science in just a few short years. However, this all happened without the family or Henrietta’s knowledge.

“Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge. Many scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment.”
(30).

Back then, consent was not always required. Although there were standard practices that suggested the consent of patients before treatment, no one enforced it because the ethics of patients’ rights were of big concern. This rang especially true in places like Baltimore, where Henrietta lived, because black people being used by doctors was nothing new. Decades of non-consensual research near the Hopkins area that killed and violated the black population had brought on the idea that any research stemming from the use of the black people was only fair for the treatment that they got in return.

Police Brutality

In the song Love It If We Made It by the 1975, the band uses the phrase,

“Start with misdemeanours and we’ll make a business out of them.”

This is believed to be talking about the wrongful, racially motivated incarceration of black people in America.Stop Killing Black People by Alexandra Jones via Flickr/ CC BY-NC 2.0

In the US, 34% of the incarcerated population is African Americans, many of those arrested for nonviolent drug charges but still given sentences that deal time more than that for a typical misdemeanor sentence. Due to high rates of incarceration, the U.S. prison system is allowed to rake in billions of dollars in revenue every year, by using prisoners as free labor. They benefit and profit off of minor crimes committed by black people because often there is stigma and pre-determined bias surrounding the African American community. They ARE more likely to be stopped by police when they aren’t doing anything unlawful just because they are black. This can result in the officer violating their privacy in efforts to arrest them, ex: killing unarmed black people.

End Police Brutality by Jamelle Bouie via Flickr/CC by 2.0

Why? Personal benefit

Both in Henrietta Lacks and Love It If We Made It, there is clear exploitation of corrupt systems by using the bodies of the people for personal benefit. They are being taken advantage of by the same systems that were supposed to take care of them and protect them. This is where personal benefit supersedes a person’s right to privacy.

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