In “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, there were several times where the medical community ignored Henrietta’s privacy for the benefit of scientific research. Henrietta and the Lacks family is constantly taken advantage of and one of the main reason for this type of treatment is racism and how they are looked down upon in society. With this racism disadvantage, Henrietta’s cells are often used without consent.

“Everyone always saying Henrietta Lacks donated those cells. She didn’t donate nothing. They took them and didn’t ask.” (Skloot,169)
As Henrietta’s doctors phrased it, they made look like Henrietta voluntarily donated her cells so that they would look bad in public. The cells were taken without Henrietta or her families’ consent which shows an invasion of privacy for the benefit of a medical breakthrough.

“The only thing Day could figure was that maybe Howard Jones had asked Henrietta for a picture, then stuck it in her medical record. But as far as Day knew, no one had ever asked permission to publish it.” (Skloot,189)
In the book “Medical Genetics”, McKusick used Henrietta’s medical records and photographs that he didn’t have permission for. This was another time where Henrietta’s privacy has been ignored and used against her own free will.

“Research on inmates would come under scrutiny and start being heavily regulated about fifteen years later, because they’d be considered a vulnerable population unable to give informed consent. But at the time, prisoners nationwide were being used for research of all kinds—from testing chemical warfare agents to determining how X-raying testicles affected sperm count.”(Skloot, 129)
During the HeLa cell research, Henrietta was treated more like an experiment than a patient and other people that were being tested on during this research were prisoners or patients that already have cancer. This is showing a lot about how the doctors don’t respect Henrietta’s privacy and only focused on experimenting with it.

This reminded me of a TV series called “Greys Anatomy”. In the show, the surgeons often had tumor cases that were so severe it was inoperable but the doctors always come up with a plan that no other doctor as tried before and the doctors expect the patients to let them operate a risky surgery. Some patients don’t want to operate because they don’t want to be the “lab rat” that is experimented on, this is similar to Henrietta because she was experimented on like a “lab rat”.

Microscope, Research, Lab, Laboratory, Science by felixioncool
Photo on Visual Hunt