The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The debate over the commercialization of human biological materials always comes back to one fundamental point: like it or not, we live in a market-driven society, and science is part of that market.

Gene patents are the point of greatest concern in the debate over ownership of human biological materials, and how that ownership might interfere with science. As

Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans,

consent for storing tissues for research, there is no clear requirement for telling donors when their tissues might result in profits.

Pneumoencephalography

Laboratories—to begin producing and selling ingredients

would like some health insurance so I don’t got to pay all that money every month for drugs my mother cells probably helped make.”

But I always have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors?

exception he would make is for people whose religious beliefs prohibit tissue donation.