I doubt Lacks and her family wouldn't have been paid for her cells in any case. Really, why would them have been? The cells were of no use to Ms. Lacks or her family and it wasn't even clear when they were taken that they would be of use to medical science. The benefits that have been derived from the cells could in no way have been predicted before hand.
Even though she had no use for her own cells, they're still hers and they were taken from her without permission while they were treating her cancer. Also, it's been 60 years since this first happened -- that's a lot of room for them to have determined that her cells were indeed helpful and that she should be retroactively compensated, or at least her family told about it. I know part of that is because the doctors who took her cells never documented her name anywhere and it took some serious digging for people to connect the dots, but... idk, your comment sounds to me like you're saying that her family shouldn't receive any compensation and taking people's genes without permission is really no big.
That's exactly what I'm saying. Her family shouldn't receive any compensation because the cells were taken as part of the diagnosis and treatment of her cancer. The part that was done without express permission was using the left over bits (which would be considered medical waste) for research which was how things were done at that time. Yes her cells were helpful but only because a number of researchers came up with clever ideas as to how to use them. Neither she nor her family had anything to do with that.
I see. Henrietta's cells actually were special because they could actually stay alive long enough to be tested on; before coming across her cells, research was stunted because it was so hard to keep cells alive. I'd say that she had something to do with it, since it was her cells, a very core part of her body.
It was a property of her cells that she had no intellectual input into either discovering or utilizing. Inventions including biomedical ones are commercialized based on the novelty of ideas.
I believe the Washington Post article notes they family wasn't even asking for compensation. It's a matter of informed consent and privacy. Both concepts weren't around the cells were first taken, but they exist today and both are vulnerable for her descendants. Especially with genome sequencing.
Another reason I'm very glad this has been pursued, beyond righting things for the Lacks descendants, is that we really are behind in developing ways of balancing the sometimes competing demands of patient privacy, etc. and researchers needing to work with human samples - law always lags behind technology. This case is a significant sally in that debate.
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