WHO Honors Henrietta Lacks, Woman Whose Cells Served Science
Source: ABC News
GENEVA -- The chief of the World Health Organization on Wednesday honored the late Henrietta Lacks, an American woman whose cancer cells were taken without her knowledge during the 1950s and ended up providing the foundation for vast scientific breakthroughs, including research about the coronavirus.
The recognition from WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus came more than a decade after the publication of "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," Rebecca Skloot's book about the discrimination in health care Black Americans faced, the life-saving innovations made possible by Lacks' cells and her family's legal fight over their unauthorized use.
"What happened to Henrietta was wrong," Tedros said during a special ceremony at WHO Geneva headquarters before handing the Director-General's Award for Henrietta Lacks to her 87-year-old son Lawrence Lacks as several of her other descendants looked on.
Lacks died of cervical cancer on Oct. 4, 1951 at age 31. The tissue taken from her at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore provided the first human cells to be successfully cloned. Reproduced infinitely ever since, HeLa cells have become a cornerstone of modern medicine, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping and even COVID-19 vaccines....
Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/honors-henrietta-lacks-woman-cells-served-science-80561776
*(Video, adjust volume)
- Henrietta Lacks, a tobacco farmer, was buried in an unmarked grave in Virginia in 1951.
- Also, Henrietta Lacks: 'Mother' of modern medicine honoured, BBC News, Oct. 13, 2021.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58903934
= new reply since forum marked as read
I know reading can be difficult...
From the article excerpt I posted -
A ml is relatively small measure.
I expect THAT is the impetus behind the suit. If it had been some research hospital or school and the cell lines were "donated" for research purposes, then that is one thing. But this was pure, unadulterated exploitation, with someone making money off of them without some kind of previous licensing agreement - or at least creation of a waiver.
But see back then, "negroes" were considered non-human and apparently are still considered so today.
But I detest exploitation more.
Right here in Philly, after the MOVE incident and bombing of the organization's home, the remains of some of the children who died in the fire - basically bone fragments that were recovered - were removed for analysis and identification, and then packed away and only brought out as a subject for university courses in anthropology and archeology departments of 2 Ivy League schools.
For decades, the bones sat discreetly in a cardboard box in a Philadelphia museum — the fragmented remains of a police bombing that had rocked the city more than 30 years ago. The city’s medical examiner had been unable to identify the pelvic and femur bones, burned beyond recognition. So city officials turned to Alan Mann, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, to confirm they belonged to Katricia “Tree” Africa, a 14-year-old killed in the bombing.
Mann says he was never able to do so. Rather than returning the bones to her family, the university acknowledged this week that they were shelved away, shuttled between academics and used in videos for an online college course. That revelation — first brought to light this month in a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed and a story in Billy Penn, a local news outlet — has reopened long-standing wounds in Philadelphia, adding a painful coda to one of the most notorious episodes in the city’s history: a violent night in 1985 when police bombed the Black radical group MOVE, razing a middle-class Black neighborhood to the ground.
In a public statement on Wednesday, officials at the university and its museum said they would work to return the remains to the Africa family and had hired lawyers to investigate how and why the bones had been stored away for so long. But Mike Africa Jr., an activist and second-generation MOVE member, said that more needed to be done following the “egregious” saga. “Who would do something like this? And without permission, without consent from the parents?” he told The Washington Post on Thursday. The victims, he added, “were people. They didn’t deserve to be bombed and then put in a lab to become research material.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/04/30/philadelphia-move-bombing-bones-upenn/
The Heath Director here who had been tasked to eventually deal with the disposition of the remains when it was finally brought up to him, essentially dismissed it and ordered them cremated - again, not contacting the surviving members of the family. He was forced to resign, right in the middle of the pandemic here, this past May -
By Emily Scott May 13, 2021
Updated 6:40 p.m.
Thomas Farley has resigned as Philadelphia’s health commissioner due to his involvement in the mishandling of remains of the victims in the 1985 MOVE bombing. His departure comes less than a month after news broke that a set of remains, thought to be 14-year-old Tree and 12-year-old Delisha Africa, were held at both the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University for decades and studied by their anthropology and archaeology departments, without the Africa family’s knowledge.
The children were inside the MOVE headquarters when the City of Philadelphia dropped a bomb on the West Philly home, killing 11 people and destroying 61 homes in the neighborhood. Farley’s resignation, which is effective immediately, was announced on May 13, the 36th anniversary of the MOVE bombing. In a statement late Thursday afternoon, Mayor Jim Kenney said he learned of a “very disturbing incident” that happened during the first term of his administration in 2017, where Farley had learned of remains found by the Medical Examiner’s Office that belonged to the bombing victims.
Upon discovering them, Farley had the remains cremated and disposed of, rather than returning them to the family.“This action lacked empathy for the victims, their family, and the deep pain that the MOVE bombing has brought to our city for nearly four decades,” Kenney said in a statement.
https://whyy.org/articles/health-commissioner-dr-thomas-farley-resigns-over-mishandling-of-move-bombing-remains/
It was supposedly later indicated that the ME's office supposedly did not cremate the remains and the city is undergoing an investigation of this and next steps after that incident.
African Americans have been exploited since the time we were fucking dragged kicking and screaming to this country to work "for free" under the threat and use of the whip and other atrocious weapons. We're not zoo animals or pets or entities whose remains should be "put on display" or anything "biological" used for research and/or profit without permission and/or designation by that person or people for that use.
There. Now is that clearer?
That says it all.
