[conspire] Henrietta Lacks

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

[citing WSJ reporter Amy Dockser Marcus:]

> Abcam ABC -0.08% PLC, a 1,400-person life-sciences company with
> headquarters in the U.K., is making a gift to the Henrietta Lacks
> Foundation to support higher-education scholarships in science,
> technology, engineering and mathematics for descendants of Ms. Lacks.
[...]
> The lab of Samara Reck-Peterson, an investigator at the Howard Hughes
> Medical Institute and professor of cellular and molecular medicine and
> of biological sciences at the University of California San Diego, said
> it utilizes the cells, commonly known as HeLa cells after Ms. Lacks, to
> study and ask research questions. The lab will donate $100 to the
> foundation for each of the four cell lines that lab members created in
> the past by making changes to the HeLa cells, and for any cell lines
> they make in the future.

This is coolness.  Poor Henrietta Lacks, killed by cervical cancer but
able to be post-mortem _immortal_ -- literally -- through her vitally
important cancer cells, deserves more lasting gratitude than just every
first-year medical student knowing by name about the HeLa cell line.  

The frequently expressed opinion that her family deserved, dunno,
royalties?, for the cell line seems more than a bit odd, however.

As the Wikipedia article points out, caselaw has firmly established that
persons and their families have no proprietary rights (at least under US
law) to a person's discarded tissue and cells.  I would be slow to call
those court rulings (in 1990's Moore v. Regents of the University of
California, and similar cases) misguided.