Henrietta Lacks estate sues company using her 'stolen' cells | Hacker News Reader

Henrietta Lacks estate sues company using her 'stolen' cells

apnews.com

15 pointsgmays9 comments

Lacks’ cells were harvested and developed long before the advent of consent procedures used in medicine and scientific research today, but lawyers for her family say Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., of Waltham, Massachusetts, has continued to commercialize the results well after the origins of the HeLa cell line became well known.

The lawsuit asks the court to order Thermo Fisher Scientific to “disgorge the full amount of its net profits obtained by commercializing the HeLa cell line to the Estate of Henrietta Lacks.” It also wants Thermo Fisher Scientific to be permanently enjoined from using HeLa cells without the estate’s permission.

> “It is outrageous that this company would think that they have intellectual rights property to their grandmother’s cells. Why is it they have intellectual rights to her cells and can benefit billions of dollars when her family, her flesh and blood, her Black children, get nothing?”

> Myriad Genetics, Inc., the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that human genes cannot be patented in the U.S. because DNA is a "product of nature." The Court decided that because nothing new is created when discovering a gene, there is no intellectual property to protect, so patents cannot be granted.

https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/testing/genep...

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-398_1b7d.pdf

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/henriettalacks/frequently-as...

> In the first case of its kind, the California Supreme Court held in Moore v. Regents of the University of California that individuals do not have an ownership interest in their cells after the cells are removed from their bodies. John Moore sought treatment from UCLA Medical Center (defendant) for hairy-cell leukemia. His attending physician, Dr. David Golde, recommended removal of Moore’s spleen for therapeutic purposes. Golde and UCLA researcher Shirley Quan planned to use Moore’s spleen tissue—which was “of great value in a number of commercial and scientific efforts”—for scientific study, a fact they never disclosed to Moore [5, 6].

> In Greenberg v. Miami Children’s Hospital Research Institute, Inc., the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida held that individuals have no property rights in body tissue and genetic material donated for research. The Greenberg family sued a physician-researcher and hospital after the researcher developed and patented a prenatal genetic test using blood and tissue samples donated by their family and others. The donated genetic material was used in the study of Canavan disease, a rare and fatal genetic disease that occurs most frequently in Ashkenazi Jewish families [8].

https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/donors-retain-n... (Donors Retain No Rights to Donated Tissue)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_v._Regents_of_the_Univer...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenberg_v._Miami_Children%27...

they are trying to milk current race relations in the US and I imagine are hoping the democrat p will back them to overstep the law so they can get a paycheck

The National Institutes of Health [Wednesday, August 7, 2013] announced in Nature that it has reached an understanding with the family of the late Henrietta Lacks to allow biomedical researchers controlled access to the whole genome data of cells derived from her tumor, commonly known as HeLa cells. These cells have already been used extensively in scientific research and have helped make possible some of the most important medical advances of the past 60 years. These include the development of modern vaccines, cancer treatments, in vitro fertilization techniques, and many others. HeLa cells are the most widely used human cell lines in existence today. Access to the whole genome data of these cells will be a valuable reference tool for researchers using HeLa cells in their research.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-lacks-fami...

One does not “own” their DNA.

Why not?

Edit; McDonalds 'owns' that M, should I trademark my DNA?

Why can a person not own their own DNA if we are to accept that a company can own a persons DNA?

No one can own DNA. Ultimately, it’s just a number. How could someone claim ownership of a number that 99% identical to mine?

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