With this, scientists will be able to perform experiments that they never could on a living human being.” “What makes this sample so unique is that this is the first cell line we have discovered in over 30 years of trying that can survive and reproduce indefinitely. George Gey (Reed Birney) explains in a 1950s-style newsreel in the film’s early moments. “In this jar, we have a sample of cancerous human tissue,” Dr. It tells a rich and unsettling story that begins with the woman of the title (played in flashbacks by Renée Elise Goldsberry), who died of cancer in 1951 but not before unwittingly making an invaluable contribution to science: cancer cells that reproduced outside the body. Wolfe, who had a starry cast at his disposal headed by Oprah Winfrey and Rose Byrne. The movie, also titled “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” was directed by George C. This fascinating tale really wanted to be a six- or eight-episode mini-series. If it sounds as if effectively truncating such an intricate, provocative book into a 93-minute movie would be nearly impossible, well, the film version that has its premiere Saturday night on HBO proves the point. Washington believes that economic pressures have led to an erosion in the application of informed consent in the years since.One of the most acclaimed nonfiction books of 2010, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” began as an investigation of a medical miracle but became a gripping, poignant story about racism, shoddy scientific ethics and a sprawling family’s painful experiences with both. The need for tissue on which to experiment continues, but now it can be a lot more financially valuable if things work out. Washington points to 1980 as a turning point, thanks to changes like the law that changed the medical-research economy and a Supreme Court decision that has been interpreted to mean that living things are subject to patents. “These conventions tended to be rigorously adhered to when it came to white people,” Washington notes.Īnd, though medical research can be complicated, she believes the basic idea - then and now - is simple: “Subjects who have normal adult intelligence are capable of understanding whether their permission has been asked.”īut, if those ethical standards have generally endured, other things have changed. In fact, she says, especially in the wake of the world learning of Nazi medical experimentation, some organizations kept consent rules that were even more stringent than those in play today. In reality, she has found that - while it is true that the laws and regulations that govern such experimentation have changed between then and now - basic ethical concepts such as informed consent were already very much in play. Washington says that one big misconception she often hears is that in 1951, when Lacks was treated, what happened to Lacks would have been just the common practice at the time. Rather, as Skloot also notes in her book, distrust like that expressed by the Lacks family is related to what’s summed up by the subtitle of Washington’s book as The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present. Washington, who has interviewed the Lacks family, says that one problem with the national narrative about Tuskegee is the risk that those unaware of the larger history that surrounds both that study and the story of Henrietta Lacks might think that African-Americans are “overreacting to a single study” if they express distrust of the medical establishment. Her cells provided a breakthrough would prove invaluable to medical research, but her family was kept in the dark even as they themselves became the subjects of scientific interest. Lacks was, as TIME explained in its initial review of Skloot’s book, a black woman treated unsuccessfully for cervical cancer in 1951, from whose tumor doctors kept a sample of tissue. With the premiere on Saturday of the HBO film The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, based on Rebecca Skloot’s best-selling book of the same name, another piece of the puzzle may get a little closer to the first-to-mind fame of Tuskegee.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |