Strange question, but at some point, could the self-sustaining cancer cells taken from Henrietta Lacks be considered a separate species?
> Henrietta Lacks (born Loretta Pleasant; August 1, 1920 – October 4, 1951)[2] was an African-American woman[3] whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line[4] and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. An immortalized cell line reproduces indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data to the present day.[5]
Neither her nor her family were ever compensated for the 'use' of her biological material nor was consent ever given for a donation. The medical-research community has profited incalculably from this.
She would have been treated better if she had recorded a song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XDpa2HLXV0&feature=youtu.be...
My point is that you need to defend your assumption that maintaining cultures of tissue samples requires consent and compensation. Concepts like intellectual property (copyright / patent / trademark) don't apply to things like tissue samples.
In my opinion using her treatment samples was grey to permissible (they already took them with permission and for a purpose serving her and it wasn't established as owned) but the deliberate morgue harvesting without permission crossed the line.
Just keeping the samples could be like keeping say a record size tumor a surgeon removed in a formaldehyde barrel is creepy but precedented and doesn't do harm. Doing it to a patient's body without permission or another valid overriding reason (say epidemiology or diagnosis to living patients infected with the same disease) is just descreation.
Edit: it's been proposed as Helacyton gartleri, but not widely accepted because "Van Valen's argument of HeLa being a new species does not fulfill the criteria for an independent unicellular asexually reproducing species because of the notorious instability of HeLa's karyotype and their lack of a strict ancestral-descendant lineage."
According to Wikipedia, the cells have a tendency to contaminate pretty much any suitable environment around and proliferate easily. Seems almost more like a fungal or bacterial growth than what we’d typically consider cancer.