First, it was the real Lone Ranger, and now here's the real Wonder Woman.
And this is becoming a totally different blog after these fools got my racial dander up:
"More than half a century ago, doctors took Henrietta Lacks' tissue and used it for research without her permission, creating the first immortal line of cells and making possible billions of dollars in medical research. Now, 62 years later, the National Institutes of Health has struck an agreement with the Lacks family that will allow for continued research while seeking to protect their medical privacy.
Henrietta Lacks, a poor African American woman, died in 1951 after battling cervical cancer at age 31, leaving behind five children. Before her death, researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore sampled her cells during a biopsy without her consent -- there were no federal regulations requiring patient consent at the time.
That sample produced a line of cancer cells that kept growing and reproducing, making them ideal for scientific study. The HeLa cells (an abbreviation of Lacks’ name) ultimately became the most widely used human cell line in the world. Some 74,000 publications refer to HeLa cells, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said at a news conference Wednesday.
The family was not asked for permission to use the cells. It was only in 1971, with the publication of a study in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, that Lacks’ identity was revealed. A 1997 BBC documentary shed further light on Lacks’ story and the 2010 bestseller "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot helped draw into the public eye the ethical issues involved in using HeLa cells. (That book is being made into a film produced by Oprah Winfrey’s company.)"
Stealing black bodies, stealing black lives - even stealing black cells:
Sheeeiit, considering how valuable blacks have been - to every single layer of this entire American enterprise - instead of NewAge whites demanding blacks be "humble," they should've been throwing us a PRIDE parade long before they hopped on the gay bandwagon,...
You didn't know about Henrietta Lacks?
ReplyDeleteThere are some estimates that her DNA is the most populous in the world thanks to those cancer cells.
It's a very American story anyway you look at it.
On one hand, there have been several discoveries made that help in the treatment of cancer (and if I'm not wrong, other areas of genetic research)thanks to those little cells.
But it really was unethical (immoral even) as shit to not ask politely for the damn things first.
Moral ambiguities ahoy!
And yes indeed, it does go all the way back to slavery (O'Reilly was very wrong about that), and it has affected millions (although I refuse to say that Oprah was right, because the woman is a flake; we'll just stay with Bill being wrong)...it goes back to the knowledge that people could be treated in such a greedy, heartless fashion by other people...and the horrible acknowledgement that it has happened before, is happening now, and will happen again.
http://blogs.jpost.com/content/eugenics-euthanasia-and-american-race-improvement
http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/index.php?page=50128
http://www.filmandhistory.org/documentary/americanhistory1/linciati.php
http://floridairishheritagecenter.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/slavery-and-the-irish/
We become "narcissists of the nearby", maybe because the scars from it are so deep, maybe because we cannot countenance ourselves as somehow not special, maybe because the myths are prettier than the realities.
While mehthinks, blacks have had front row seats to this nasty little show, and thus can be excused for worrying it like bone (after all, their scar is the deepest...they were the ones who got labelled as having no souls; they got the front row to a show nobody really wants to see), it is perhaps worth reminding whites (and browns, tans, reds, yellows, and whatever -- the world is not black and white in the details, if it is so in the nitty of the gritty) that they were not so special as to have ancestors flicked by a lash in this country, as well as having the (morally) superior abolitionists and the (materially) superior massas...it is a myth to think that they were sll this class of mythic free people, when evidence shows us many were not...and the vulnerability of that (and perhaps, heh, lack of purity) is something most of them cannot quite stomach (but they need to -- claiming victimhood, however, is not confronting though, as that in itself confers a specialness title, no, the path, heh, imhao will have to begin with forgetting any claims of specialness other than the nature of being alive and human).
In the meantime: nobody deserves to be treated like an animal...heh, not even animals deserve to have their intrinsic nature taken from them...so if that's the case, how can one justify not giving a human being their human beingness?
And then we are right back full circle to the whole New Age thing.
PW
*in the meantime, I still love America and Americans...we are the descendants of not so special people who are managing to survive and actually try to live, and I think we owe it to all of our forebears (like the long forgotten, but proliferately spead over the globe at the molecular level Mrs. Lacks) to do better by them (getting other people on board with that may be a problem however)
And of course, if she had been asked politely, told that those scrapings might hold the possibility to progress science and better the lives of countless others in the future...being above all else an American...I would lay a bet that Mrs. Lacks would have gladly donated as much tissue as they thought they needed.
ReplyDeleteBecause she was, after all, an average, run of the mill, everyday, American (back in the day when we as a whole had a better understanding of what that meant).
PW