How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #7
"I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we'd been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman." (91)
After Henrietta's death, Gey's lab assistant Mary Kubicek was called in to assist with the autopsy so she could get more cell samples. Which seemed like a good idea, until Mary is confronted with Henrietta's humanity. Skloot's book shows over and over again that breaches in medical ethics often happen when doctors and scientists dissociate their work from the human subjects who make it happen.
Quote #8
Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus—and at the very same time—that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies. (97)
Skloot points out the irony of the first HeLa factory being established at the Tuskegee Institute, where black men were being exploited and allowed to die as research subjects. Several members of Henrietta's family will later point out the same irony: their mother's cells helped to create vaccines and drugs, none of which were readily available to her relatives because they were too expensive.
Quote #9
He repeated this process with about a dozen other cancer patients. He told them he was testing their immune systems; he said nothing about injecting them with someone else's malignant cells. (128)
This has gotta be the worst. Chester Southam's injection of HeLa cells into uninformed (and already ill) patients really pushed the envelope of ethical scientific experimentation. While there were doctors in his day who criticized these studies, there were even more who didn't think his experiments were a problem. In the end, Southam was really never punished, though policies did change to prevent this kind of research.