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Comment by tantalor | Hacker News Reader

Consent to what? Be photographed?

I think the analogy is perfect; she consented to be photographed, but was powerless over the consequences.

Edit: ah sorry, got them confused.

Henrietta Lacks was the woman with the immortal cancer cell line, used for research for decades without her knowledge and consent or her family’s knowledge and consent (she died soon after the cells were harvested). She was also black, which complicates things significantly.

Henrietta Lacks and Lena Forsén are/were different people.

Henrietta Lacks had her mutated cells collected without consent, these cells have been kept alive and duplicated for decades after her death. I sure as hell wouldn't consent to what happened to her.

I don't get this stuff about Henrietta Lacks' consent. It's a cellular line. A biopsy of a cancer. I understand consent should be given, but there's nothing personal or sentient in a strain of cancerous cells. This to me sounds just like pure, pointless whining. I can only guess she'd be happy to have been important for science and research on what killed her.

> there's nothing personal or sentient in a strain of cancerous cells

There's countless trillions of her cells, with her DNA, in research labs all over the country. She never consented to that, and her family isn't happy about it. We can't know her wishes because she died of that cancer, but something like this would never pass an ethics review board today.

There is a long history of black americans being subjected to medical procedures or experiments without their consent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study), which makes this particularly problematic.

According to the HeLa Wikipedia entry, it was common at the time to use patients' cells without their consent. The fact that she was black doesn't seem to have much to do with it, and all she was subjected to was a routine biopsy. Doctors were just delighted that those cells kept duplicating, otherwise they'd have ended in the bin like everyone else's.

I do understand that discovering that one of your relatives' cancerous cells are still reproducing in laboratories after decades can be astounding and give a moment of pause. But it in the end it's for good, no one was harmed and nobody made an unjust fortune off it. The cells are barely human anyway, with 75 to 80 chromosomes and rapidly accumulating mutations. I don't see what all the fuss is about.

Medical consent is "pointless whining?". There's also nothing personal or sentient about organ harvesting prisoners too. The desire to not have parts of your body kept alive after death is pretty common. Maybe it's a good thing the people of HN work on ways yo serve ads and not anything substantial.

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