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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XDpa2HLXV0&feature=youtu.be...