Due to a nasty headcold, I stayed home today and finished reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Here are some startling numbers in the Afterword (p. 315)
"Today most Americans have their tissue on file somewhere. When you go to the doctor for a routine blood test or have a move removed, when you have an appendectomy, tonsillectomy, or any other kind of ectomy, the stuff you leave behind doesn't always get thrown out. Doctors, hospitals, and laboratories keep it. Often indefinitely. In 1999 the RAND Corporation published a report with a 'conservative estimate' that more than 307 million tissue samples from more than 178 million people were stored in the United States alone. This number, the report said, was increasing by more than 20 million samples each year. ... They sit in lab freezers, on shelves, or in industrial vats of liquid nitrogen. They're stored at military facilities, the FBI, the National Institutes of Health..."
The question remains whether the use of human cells without consent is ethical or not. That is one of the central questions asked in this book. Cancer cells were scraped from the cervix of Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge. The cells were labeled "HeLa" and her name was not attached. These cancer cells reproduced profusely, when normal cells did not. It was decades before the family knew that Henrietta's cells were in labs around the world and being used for major breakthroughs in science, such as a vaccine against polio.
The cells are still used today. In fact, a friend of mine who is a high school Biology teacher told me she has HeLa cells in her lab refrigerator at school.
