Did Henrietta Know?

“’I’ll never forget’, Aurelian said. ‘George told me he leaned over Henrietta’s bed and said ‘Your cells will make you immortal.’ He told Henrietta her cells would help save the lives of countless people, and she smiled. She told him she glad her pain would come to some good for someone” (Skloot 66).

This passage is special because it suggests that Henrietta was told her cells were taken and were being used for medical experiments. It also implies that she was in peace, before she died, with her cells being taken from her and that they would live forever. One can have a slight idea of what wonderful person Henrietta must have been by reading her words that she is glad that her pain would come to some good for someone. My opinion is that Henrietta was a giver and a selfless person who was always thinking about doing good deeds to others.

Why Are HeLa Cells Important?

“The reason Henrietta’s cell were so precious was because they allowed scientists to perform experiments that would have been impossible with a living human. They cut HeLa cells and exposed them to endless toxins, radiation and infection. They bombarded them with drugs, hoping to find one that would kill malignant cells without destroying normal ones. They studied immune suppression and cancer growth by injecting HeLa cells into immune-compromised rats, which developed malignant tumors like much like Henrietta’s. If cells died in the process, it didn’t matter – scientists could go back to their eternally growing HeLa stock and start all over again“ (Skloot 58).

I like this passage because it explains the importance of HeLa cells to science and how scientists can performs experiments without any concern if cells are going to die or not. They could not perform the same experiments on a person who is alive because they, scientists, were not sure what the results of such experiments were going to be, as it is the case in most experiments. Without HeLa cells, such experiments would have been impossible to perform. Hence, HeLa cells were, and still are, crucial to medical development.

Segregation

“On January 29, 1951, David Lacks sat behind the wheel of his Buick, watching the rain fall. He was parked under a towering oak tree outside John’s Hopkins Hospital with three of his children - two still in diapers – waiting for their mother, Henrietta. A few minutes earlier, she’d jumped out of her car, pulled her jacket over her head, and scurried into the hospital, past the “colored” bathroom, the only one she was allowed to use”. (Skloot 13)

I chose this passage because it makes reference to a time when segregation was a real problem in the U.S. The assigned facilities to white and “colored” people, as referenced to in this passage, were clear examples of how divided society was in those days. What shocks me the most is that this happened not too long ago. Even though some white Americans welcomed African Americans as full and equal citizens, many others used ignorance, racism and self interest to maintain and spread racial division. It is specially embarrassing that the government created laws that condemned non-white Americans to second-class citizenship.

I hope that this book will address the racial division because this is a subject that draws my attention. I am originally from Brazil, and even though we also had slavery and racial discrimination is still a problem they face there, it was never institutionalized as it was here in the U.S. How can a nation who trusts in God, as it is mentioned in many American symbols, and who is a global leader in many ways sponsor such a retrograde mentality? I just don not understand.

Deborah's Voice

“But I always have thought it was strange , if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin about them takin her cells, now we don’t get a dime. I used to get so mad about that to where it made me sick and I had to take pills. But I don’t got it in me no more to fight. I just want to know who my mother was”. (Skloot 9)

I like this passage because it raises a few questions about Henrietta’s case. The first one is the irony that the family who has involuntarily contributed so much to the advance of medicine and science in general not be able to afford medical coverage? The second question it raises is if the patients or their family deserves any credit in medical research they happen to have participated in. These are question with no easy answers.

Of course Henrietta’s family deserve medical coverage, but don’t any other family? It definitely sounds unfair that so many people have benefited from HeLa cells and that Henrietta’s family has not seen a dime from it, and they can’t even afford to go see a doctor. However, people who participate in medical research are usually volunteers. Furthermore, Henrietta didn’t even know that an extra sample was taken from her cancer.

Let’s now consider if she had been asked if they could take an extra sample of her cancer. She could have said no and many people would have died from cancer, polio among other diseases whose cure came research done on HeLa cells. She could also have said, yes and would have been the right thing to do. Should people really get rewarded for doing the right thing? If so, I want a dime for every time I stop at a red light.

As I read this book, I hope that Rebecca will address these questions. I want to see what experts, doctors, philosophers among others, have to say about this ethical issues

Hydraulic Fracturing: Bringing Facts to Light

If you are like most people in the U.S., all you know about hydraulic fracturing, or fracking as it is popularly known, is perhaps the fracking song or the documentary Gasland which suggest that fracking is contaminating water supplies to the point that water can be lit on fire. Fracking is a fast-growing practice used to recover natural gas which burns more cleanly than coal and oil. Natural gas is an abundant energy resource in the U.S., and it is mainly used today to create electricity, heat homes and heavily used in factories. Environmentalist say that natural gas will help slow down global warming due to its low carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. The controversy is that the only way that natural gas exploration and production can be economically viable is by combining hydraulic fracture and horizontal drilling. Whereas environmentalists claim that this new technology poses major threats to our environment, experts claim that it is safe if done responsibly and competently. Considering that natural gas is our cleanest readily available energy option as we move towards clean, sustainable energy sources, we can not afford to sacrifice the potential benefits from natural gas if fracking is banned altogether. As the technology evolves, the government needs to develop sound regulation on hydraulic fracturing in order to hold oil companies accountable to higher drilling standards.

          The new technology used to explore and produce natural gas consists of drilling vertically until a target rock formation is reached. Once in the target zone, six to eight horizontal wells are drilled from a single vertical well. The fracking is then performed in those horizontal wells. Hydraulic Fracturing is the pumping of a hydraulic fluid under extreme pressure into a target geological formation to create fractures or cracks in the rock. These fissures allow the natural gas to flow more freely out of the aggregate into the well in economic quantities. The fracture fluid is made primarily of water. The water is mixed with sand and other additives that help with the fracturing process. Water and sand make up over 98% of the fracture fluid (1). The amount of water needed to drill a well and fracture the rock usually ranges from 2 to 4 million gallons, depending on unique characteristics of each basin and formation. These numbers may sound large, but it is relatively small when compared to other water uses such as agriculture. Ground water reservoirs and the environment in general are protected by a combination of casing, steel pipes, and cement that is installed when the well is drilled. Furthermore, there are thousands of feet of strata separating the fractured horizontal wells and any fresh or treatable aquifers. Although natural gas offers a number of environmental advantages over other sources of energy, it still not perfect, and its exploration commonly damages the environment.

One environmental consideration associated with natural gas development is surface disturbance. Roads and well pads are needed to access the well site. These are constructed to safely move and relocate the drilling rig and other equipments associated with the drilling process. Pits are excavated to contain the drilling fluids. As production sites move closer and closer to more populated areas, people are also disturbed by noisy equipments and a drastically increase in traffic of heavy vehicles and machinery. This increased traffic frequently exceeds the weight load of public roadways that were not originally designed to withstand the high traffic volume of heavy equipment, drastically accelerating pavement weathering caused by extensive damages to the road structure. Consequently, tax payers who live close to active well sites are adversely affected by the gas production operations given that a larger portion of the local government resource is allocated to roadway maintenance. Furthermore, activities associated with gas development can affect wildlife. As more and more wells, roads and pipelines are built, wildlife habitat becomes fragmented, and vast wooded areas are cleared. Reclamation of such disturbed includes land contouring and re-vegetation measures. These measures occur over a long period of time which endangers the very existence of many species.