Segregation In Medical Facilities

Despite of what segregationists, like George Wallace and protesters on the image below, believe, many of us cannot deny that The Jim Crow  system caused more harm to society than good.

Video 1: Jan. 14, 1963: Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, calling for Segregation forever. Source: ABC News Videos.

Fig. 1: Protesters rally against integration at the State Capitol, Little Rock,
             Arkansas, 1959. By John T. Bledsoe

The legitimized discrimination of African Americans created a widespread neglect of many citizens caused especially by segregation within hospitals and medical facilities. Rebecca Skloot implies in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks that the John Hopkins Hospitals had wards for “colored” people and wards for white people during the Jim Crow, and staff were instructed “to send people away, even it meant they might die in the parking lot” (Skloot 15).

Fig. 2: Sign suggesting segregated facilities. Photo from wcny.org by unknown author.

Fig. 3: Segregation in medical facilities remained even after it had been outlawed. This picture shows an overcrowded maternity ward at the Memphis' John Gaston Hospital in 1970. Photo by the Commercial Appeal Files.

The medical experience was drastically different for Blacks and Whites, as the picture above suggests. In Raleigh, North Carolina, at one point the St. Agnes Hospital was the only facility that accepted African Americans, and it was also the location where sad events have taken place. In the 50s, Chales Drew, the man who discovered a way to store blood, had an accident and needed blood plasma. He was taken to the St. Agnes Hospital because he was a n African American. However, the technology he invented was not available there, even though is was already a common practice at hospitals that served Whites. He died as a result of this cruel irony.

Fig. 4: St Agnes Hospital, the once only medical care facility for African Americans in Raleigh, North Carolina. Photo by John Morris.

African Americans were also in many case victims of unethical human experimentation. Among the victims of those Nazi inspired projects are 7 male infants who were secretly fed radioactive iodine at the University of Tennessee Memphis; 17 newborn infants received intramuscular radioiodine at the University of Iowa; many pregnant women who were secretly injected radioisotope phosphorus-32 before and after delivery at the AC Berkeley; and some 600 poor African American -200 of which were healthy at before they entered the program- from rural Alabama who participated in the Tuskegee syphilis experiment- they were never told they had syphilis and were never treated, even though treatment was already available.

Fig. 5: Tuskegee "test subject" having his blood drawn. Photo by Jstaloriv.

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Fig. 6: Birth anomalies due to radioactive material experimentation on humans. Photo by Christofer Brusby.

Even though the Jim Crow system is long gone and segregation has been made illegal, statistics suggests that medicare might still be not equal for Blacks and Whites.

Fig. 5: Statistics shows that life expectancy for Blacks is lower than that for Whites.

I hope one day Martin Luther King's dream will come true, and the United States of America will be a true progressive nation that provides equality, freedom, justice and prosperity to all citizens.

Video 2: Matin Luther King's addressing civil rights protester in Washington, August 28 1963. Source: Youtube.com, posted by sullentoys.

“Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore...” 

- Cesar Chavez

The Real Wonder Woman

According to Joseph Campbell’s, we are all heroes. I understand that this discussion is either about Rebecca and/or Deborah - and I am in no way shape or form denying their heroism - , but as they crossed the threshold into the unknown world, they resurrected an unwitting hero: Henrietta Lacks. In my opinion, Henrietta is the real wonder woman.

Henrietta Lacks, a descendant of slaves and slaveholders, grew up in Clover, VA farming tobacco on her family land, the same land her relative still farm today. Aspiring a dream of becoming middle class, she left her childhood home and migrated to Baltimore. She was on the mildest of her journey when her life was cut short. However, her cells lived on to realize society’s dreams of health and knowledge.

When alive, Henrietta was known for being a giver and always willing to help others. She was constantly smiling and it was very pleasant to be around her, as reported by many of her friends and family members. She helped on the farm until she moved to Baltimore. Henrietta helped in many more ways than she ever imagined.

Henrietta entered the John Hopkins University clinic seeking help with her bleeding cervical. It was later discovered that Henrietta suffered from a cancerous cervical tumor. Without her consent, doctors removed sample of her tissue which not only survived outside of Henrietta’s body, but they thrived. They continued growing to become the HeLa cells. Without HeLa, scientists could not’t have tested for diseases such as polio, hepatitis, rabies, smallpox, measles, leukemia, HIV, and several other types of cancer without the sacrifice of human lives. Furthermore, HeLa cells sped up the research process and saved researchers billions of dollars.

In a way, Henrietta signed a pact with the devil when she entered the Johns Hopkins clinic. On October 4, 1951, Mrs. Lacks passed away after great sorrow and agony. She died in a racially segregated ward of the Johns Hopkins hospital. But the saga of this unwitting hero does not end with her death or with her contributions to science. Her story has shed light on the continued racist exploitation of the powerless and the poor civilians without the resources to provide for their medical care who often fall victims of the many Nazi like experiments performed by the government.

Authorities seemed to believe, in those days, that they had the right to experiment on the unfortunate poor because they could not pay for medical fees. Because their bills were paid by our tax money, they felt that the millions of powerless and poor citizens had the moral obligation to give something in return to society.

Our unsung hero was betrayed by the nation she trusted. Her body, like those of many others unfortunate patients, was intentionally turned into a test tube for the US government. Henrietta did not die of cancer. She was killed by radium radiation because she was part of a covert cold-war program that was experimenting on radium to discover its affects on the human body. Henrietta’s journey sheds light on the wrongdoing and crimes against humanity committed by projects, generally sponsored by the CIA, involving unsuspected civilians used as human guinea pigs.

Among the victims of those Nazi inspired projects are 7 male infants who were secretly fed radioactive iodine at the University of Tennessee Memphis; 17 newborn infants received intramuscular radioiodine at the University of Iowa; many pregnant women who were secretly injected radioisotope phosphorus-32 before and after delivery at the AC Berkeley; the Rongelap people from the Marshall Islands who were deliberately exposed to radiation after the explosion of 67 atomic and hydrogen bombs.

As part of her therapy for cervical cancer, Dr. Lawrence Wharton, a Johns Hopkins surgeon, stitched a tube containing 4800 mg-h of radium capsules to the wall of Henrietta’s cervix. The radium and x-ray therapy were presumed to slow down mitosis of the cancerous cells, but in fact it killed Mrs. Lacks. The radium was provided as a “courtesy” of the US Atomic Energy Commission. The same sponsor of the many experiments performed on the victims mentioned above.

At the time of Henrietta’s admission, the Johns Hopkins was a major covert CIA covert human guinea pig institution. Aside experiment with radiation, they performed research and experimented with drugs for mind control. The CIA project was part of the agency effort to develop a brainwashing technology and drug to affect large populations.

In light of this, with the help of Deborah and Rebecca, Henrietta is my chosen hero. She is my chosen hero not because of her accomplishments. She is my chosen hero because of her personal misfortune. She is the real wonder woman who has paid the ultimate price. She may have never returned home, but her cells are still alive to this day. They will live for the great benefit of humanity in both scientific and moral ways

To Clone or Not to Clone?

He snapped back, “ Who cares what his name is? He always telling people my mother name Helen Lane!” Zakariyya stood, towering over me, yelling, “What he did was wrong! Dead wrong. You leave that stuff up to God. People say maybe them taking her cells and makin them live forever to create medicines was what God wanted. But I don’t think so. If He wants to provide a disease cure, He’d provide a cure of his own, it’s not for man to tamper with. And you don’t lie and clone people behind their backs. That’s so wrong- it’s one of the most violating parts of this whole thing. It’s like me walking up to your bathroom while you in there with your pants down. It’s the highest degree of disrespect. That’s why I say I hope he burns in hell. If he were here right now, I’d kill him dead (Skloot 246).

I like this paragraph because it raises the question about the controversy around cloning. In Zakariyya’s opinion, man should not be tempering with God’s will. I am not so sure about that. Make no mistake, I am not sure about cloning a whole person, but the benefits of cloning tissues and organs are unimaginable. One that stands out in my mind is that people that need transplant will be able to live the rest of their life with more normalcy that they the ones who have transplanted organs do now – they need to take many different drugs so their bodies don’t reject the new organ. My own personal opinion is that more good than harm will come from cloning and stem cell researches. What do you think?

A few days later, ten months after our first conversation, Deborah called me. When I answered the phone, she yelled, “Fine, I’ll talk to you!” She didn’t say who she was and didn’t need to. “If I’m gonna do this, you got to promise me some things,” she said. “First, if my mother is so famous in science history, you got to tell everybody to get her name right. She ain’t no Helen Lane. And second, everybody always say Henrietta Lacks had four children. That ain’t right, she had five children. My sister died and there’s no leavin her out of the book. I know you gotta tell all the Lacks story and there’ll be good and bad in that cause of my brothers. You gonna learn all that, I don’t care. The thing I care about is, you gotta find out what happened to my mother and my sister, cause I need to know (Skloot 233).

This passage is very important because it is milestone. From this point on, Deborah helps Skloot with her research about Henrietta. She starts to have detailed information and unprecedented access to Henrietta’s medical records. She also has access to Elsie’s records. Furthermore, Deborah starts to introduce Skloot to other family members. This is also a milestone because it reveals the motives why Deborah wants to help Skloot. I especially like the fact that Deborah helped Skloot not because of money, but because she wanted to make sure that the world got the story right. She was especially concerned about the world knowing that her mother’s name was Henrietta Lacks and the she had five children instead of four as many believed. The sense of pride I get out of Deborah is inspirational.

Chapter Twenty-One: Night Doctors

“But night doctors weren’t just fictions conjured as scare tactics. Many doctors tested drug on slaves and operated on them to develop new surgical techniques, often without using anesthesia. Fear of night doctors only increased in the early 1900s, as black people migrated north to Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, and news spread that medical schools there were offering money in exchange for bodies. Black corpses were routinely being exhumed from graves for research and an underground shipping industry kept schools in the North supplied with black bodies from the South for anatomy courses. The bodies sometimes arrived, a dozen or so at a time, in barrels labeled turpentine” (Skloot 166).

I like this passage because not only it shows that there is some truth behind the myth of the night doctors, but also because it illustrates Rebecca’s writing style. She successfully engaged me as a reader and caught my attention. Every time I pick up the book for a reading session I some across some passage that I think to myself “I have to tell everyone I know about this!”  Her meticulous research brings this real story to life, and the way she developed her characters makes me fell like I am watching a movie in 3-D. She successfully combines scientific research with personal perspective. As I am approaching the end of the book I often find myself asking how come I haven’t read this book before. This is definitely a must read for everyone who enjoys good writing about facts with a flavor of fiction.

Chapter Twenty: The HeLa Bomb

“Gartler’s findings did not go over well. In fifteen years since George Gey had first grown HeLa, the number of published articles involving cell culture had more than tripled each year. Scientist had spent millions of dollars conducting research on those cells to study the behavior of each tissue type, comparing one to another, testing the unique response of different cell types to specific drugs, chemicals, or environment. If all those cells were in fact HeLa, it would mean that millions of dollars had been wasted, and researchers who’d found that various cells behaved differently in culture could have some explaining to do” (Skloot 153).

This passage refers to the commotion Gartler’s announcement created when he suggested that HeLa was contaminating every single lab in the world and their cell cultures. I like this passage because it reminds how slow scientific advancement moves and how much effort is put into researches. It made me think about the big dispute between Darwin and Lamarck over how life evolved. Even though they both agreed that life changes gradually over time to a better suited form and become more adapted to their environments, they disagreed on how and if changes were passed to following generations.

On the one hand Lamarck believed that changes made by what and organism want or needs were passed down to offspring. He also believed that evolution happens according to a predetermined plan and that results have already been decided. On the other hand Darwin believed that changes in an organism during his life do no affect evolution. He suggested that the variation within the same species is what helps them to thrive or to disappear from the face or the Earth according to natural selection. The individuals with helpful traits thrive, while the ones not so well adapted die off. Eventually, over time, all of the individuals from that species will have the good trait. Although Darwin’s theory is accepted today, during his days he was humiliated in many different occasion for his revolutionary ideas. I imagine this was a similar situation as that of the HeLa cell bomb theory.