Historical Context
There is no specific date or time in which it can be said that exploitation of people for medical research began. When it comes to medical and scientific research, it has always been safer to test it on some people before it is released into public, although unfortunately that has not always been the case. The oldest and most commonly used human cell line is called a HeLa cell. HeLa cells are a group, or a line, of cells gathered from a person for scientific research. The reason why they are called HeLa cells are because cell lines are usually named after the people from who they got the cells from. The cells derived from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, hence the first two letters of her first and last name led to the name HeLa cells. Henrietta was a cancer patient whose cells were taken from her tissue samples and grown by a doctor named Dr. George Grey, this happened in 1951. Dr. Grey noticed that her cells were different because they just kept growing and growing and growing. It has been more than 50 years since it was discovered that her cells were different and now there are billions of HeLa cells in laboratories and medical research centers used to study things such as the effects of diseases, and also used when developing new medicine. Although the HeLa cells have brought an extreme amount of knowledge to the medical research world with tons of benefits like helping with “some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, and in vitro fertilization.” (Skloot 2010), they seem to have not brought many benefits to Henrietta Lacks herself and her family. Neither Henrietta or her family know that her cells were being used for such research. So while her cells became something that were commercialized and sold again and again for years everywhere, Henrietta and her family in poverty. They didn’t even have healthcare, how ironic. There was no type of consent involved when it came to using the cells and it just goes to show how the ethics of research like that were not at good standing at the time. Henrietta’s cells have benefited people all over the world, but they didn’t benefit her.