"Though no law or code of ethics required doctors to ask permission before taking tissue from a living patient, the law made it very clear that performing an autopsy or removing tissue from the dead without permission was illegal."
I think it's interesting the way Henrietta was treated more like a human after she died than when she was alive. The morals of science, & in society in general really, was so skewed & still is today in some cases, regardless of how much "progress" has been made. Later in the book, a nurse recalls Henrietta's red nail polish being chipped & hadn't thought of her as a human being until then. And nobody thought she was human, it was all about her cells, they thought of her as the polio vaccine or a way to look younger. While the scientific progress made in preventing certain viruses & whatnot was great, her family still had no idea what was happening, they were living there own lives. Scientists didn't care or know that the Lacks children were abused or sexually harassed, the kids didn't even know their mom was dead really. With all the new information to be had, it's surprising how little either science or the Lacks family cared or knew about each other.
It's fascinating to see how hyped up vaccines were back then. Remember that time when you got polio? No? That's because people got their kids vaccinated & now, so many kids are more likely to get certain viruses because their parents think it might give them autism which is ridiculous because the science behind that was proved wrong with other science & the scientis that
I think it's interesting the way Henrietta was treated more like a human after she died than when she was alive. The morals of science, & in society in general really, was so skewed & still is today in some cases, regardless of how much "progress" has been made. Later in the book, a nurse recalls Henrietta's red nail polish being chipped & hadn't thought of her as a human being until then. And nobody thought she was human, it was all about her cells, they thought of her as the polio vaccine or a way to look younger. While the scientific progress made in preventing certain viruses & whatnot was great, her family still had no idea what was happening, they were living there own lives. Scientists didn't care or know that the Lacks children were abused or sexually harassed, the kids didn't even know their mom was dead really. With all the new information to be had, it's surprising how little either science or the Lacks family cared or knew about each other.
It's fascinating to see how hyped up vaccines were back then. Remember that time when you got polio? No? That's because people got their kids vaccinated & now, so many kids are more likely to get certain viruses because their parents think it might give them autism which is ridiculous because the science behind that was proved wrong with other science & the scientis that