Most of us working in research know the story of Henrietta Lacks, a woman whose cells were collected from her without her knowledge or consent in 1951. The so-called HeLa cells have been extensively used in research ever since, without her family’s knowledge or approval for much of that time.
An attorney representing some members of Lacks’ extended family now says she plans to file a petition for guardianship of the cells “to help family members regain some kind of control of their mother’s cells, which have been reproduced billions of times for medical research,” according to a recent Washington Post article. The attorney, Christina Bostick, is quoted as saying there are at least 17,000 U.S. patents that involve the HeLa cells.
Please read the entire article, which also contains links to other related articles. The Guardian reported that European scientists made Lacks’ entire DNA sequence available online — without checking with her family first. Rebecca Sloot, author of a popular book about the Lacks case, wrote a New York Times column about this distribution of genetic data. “The view have today of genomes is like a world map, but Google Street View is coming very soon.”
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