Biologia

la vida

It seems as if everyday there is progress in different medical fields including biotechnology and genetic engineering. New data is being found in different labs around the world, old techniques are being replaced with more modern ones, drugs are being made due to new information and technology available now, and the world as a whole has completely reinvented itself when it comes toscience and medicine. We know so much more now in the year 2011 than we knew 50, 40, or even 20 years ago, much of this has to do with the advancement of computers, however when it comes down to it we really owe everything to the smallest, functional and biological unit of all organisms; the cell.
The cell has been studied for many centuries now, but we are still arriving at new information andall is not known yet. The name “Tissue cells” can be used to describe all cells in our body, Biology-online.org defines tissue cells as: “An aggregate of cells in an organism that have similar structure and function of which the fundamental types of tissues in humans are epithelial, nerve, connective, muscle, and vascular.” The majority of tissue cells studied have been donated to hospitals ormedical schools, however that’s not always the case. Tissue removed from the body either during a test or as a result of a surgery, procedure, or even autopsy is not always destroyed as most people think, “the destination and use of human tissue removed from the body varies” (Dworkin and Kennedy 1993). Because of the uncertainty in the destination of human tissue cells as well as the lack ofexpected destruction many concerns have risen regarding the rights of our total bodies as well as parts of our body. This has lead to questions in legalities over who owns what and who should benefit from profit, if any, that is gained through information that is acquired from parts of the body that once belonged to someone else, and such is the case of Henrietta Lacks.
Henrietta Lacks, bornLoretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia, on August 1, 1920 (Skoot 2000), she is the unknowing became the donor of what are now called HeLa cells, the first immortal line of human cells. Her story began in 1951, when Henrietta visited John Hopkins University hospital because of pain in her cervix and was diagnosed with cervical cancer. The examining gynecologist, Dr. Howard Jones, noticed that it wasdifferent from others he had ever seen. Richard Wesley TeLinde, head of gynecology at Hopkins, had previously contacted a third doctor at Hopkins, Dr. George Otto Gey, and had offered him a supply of cervical cancer tissue in exchange for trying to grow some cells. Dr. Gey had “spent the last three decades working to grow malignant cells outside the body, hoping to use them to find cancer's causeand cure” (Skloot 2010). It wasn’t until he received the cells from Henrietta Lack’s cancer that he was able to manufacture cells that could live outside of the human body for longer than a few days. These cells have led to numerous discoveries, medicines, procedures, patents, and even benefits. Twenty years passed before the family became aware of any information regarding the cells that hadonce been part Henrietta, cells that were taken and processed without consent as that was the standard at the time, things changed with the implementation of informed consent forms but even informed consent could not help set rules and regulations as to tissue cells rights. It wasn’t until decades later that the judicial system would make a ruling to establish property rights on discarded bodyparts.
That case is the story of John Moore, who went to UCLA Medical Center for a confirmation of a diagnosis of hairy cell leukemia. They performed tests on his blood, bone marrow and other bodily fluids these test results revealed that Moore’s cells would be useful for genetic research. A few days later his doctor, Dr. David W. Golde, proposed a splenectomy which was performed based on his...