Henrietta Lacks - Primary 5/Secondary 5
In chapter 17, Louis Lefkowitz, New York State Attorney General, expressed his beliefs regarding the situation with HeLa cells and the fact that the Lacks family just plain out doesn’t know what is happening to them. He says, “Every human being has an inalienable right to determine what shall be done with his own body. These patients then had a right to know…the contents of the syringe: and if this knowledge was to cause fear and anxiety or make them frightened, they had a right to be fearful and frightened and thus say NO to the experiment.“ There is an immediate connection here between the abstract topic of racial prejudice and this quote, an even stronger connection than the once I discussed previously. Everyone has unalienable rights, everyone has the right to know what is happening. But the Lacks family, they had no idea what was happening. They were fearful, they were anxious, they were frightened. They didn’t have a choice in the experiment. This is all because of racial prejudice and segregation at the time; African Americans didn’t have these unalienable rights. They were all treated way worse than their Caucasian counterparts.
A secondary source that relates to what is discussed above is an article discussing racism and its connection to both health and the story of Henrietta Lacks. The article offers further context on the story of HeLa cells, and that not many people knew about who was actually responsible for the creation of these cells, because they were African American. This heavily relates to both the abstract topic and the quote discussed above, in the fact that racial prejudice is the responsibility of all of these outcomes.
(http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2010/02/05/racism-and-health-henrietta-lacks-revisited/)
