Is the Lacks family still angry about HeLa cells?
The Lacks family has gotten to a point where they try to separate what happened with Henrietta’s cells versus what happened to them. Henrietta’s cells have been this incredible thing for science and her family really sees that as a miracle, and they’ve gotten to a point now where they can look at them and say, “We think that they’re incredible, and they’ve done wonderful things and that makes us happy. We’re very glad that her cells are out there and being used in the way that they are. We wish it didn’t happen the way that it did. We wish they’d told us, we wish they’d asked, because we would have said yes. We wish they’d explained things to us when we asked, we wish they hadn’t released her medical records.” There were a lot of things they were unhappy about in terms of the way that they were treated, but the way they think about the cells definitely does not reflect a feeling of her being enslaved. It’s more of her being an angel. In life Henrietta was this woman who just took care
The Lacks family has gotten to a point where they try to separate what happened with Henrietta’s cells from what happened to them. Henrietta’s cells have been this incredible thing for science and her family really sees that as a miracle, and they’ve gotten to a point now where they can look at them and say, “We think that they’re incredible, and they’ve done wonderful things and that makes us happy. We’re very glad that her cells are out there and being used in the way that they are. We wish it didn’t happen the way that it did. We wish they’d told us, we wish they’d asked, because we would have said yes. We wish they’d explained things to us when we asked, we wish they hadn’t released her medical records.” There were a lot of things they were unhappy about in terms of the way that they were treated, but the way they think about the cells definitely does not reflect a feeling of her being enslaved. It’s more of her being an angel. In life Henrietta was this woman who lived to take car
