Part 1 Contemporary Ethics Reflection
Competency 3
Part 1 contemporary ethics Reflection
- Do you agree with Lengauer’s analogy? Why or why not?
- Think about some of the interactions that occurred throughout the book. What examples can you find that would now be prohibited by the laws, statutes, and acts covered this week?
- What contemporary ethics and laws in health care practice do Lengauer’s views go against?
I disagree because stated in the land of how the possession goes the primary relevance of the ownership theory a state embrace has followed from the acknowledgement or non-recognition of the owner’s existing right of possession of oil and gas in the ground, the value of oil is treated differently. Land rights are classed as corporeal or incorporeal in common law, depending on whether they include the right to bodily possession. Oil is a non-living substance with no dignity comparable to that of humans. People would be worthless personally if Lengauer’s theory were correct.
People with interesting biological features would become experiment targets, lowering their worth. I believe that everyone has a right to their security and that because all people are equal, no human should have power over another’s cells, as this would let the former do whatever they want with the latter. Giving some people control over others in a world riven by racial politics would be devastating (Choi et al., 2018).
Interactions like the one that occurred when a doctor treated Henrietta with Radium for the first time while also harvesting cells from her tumour are prohibited because the doctor did not obtain the patient’s consent. Gey’s growth of Henrietta’s cells without her permission would be illegal today (Skloot, 2014). On the same line, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, which Rebecca mentions, would be unlawful now since it infringes black people’s privacy.
When Victor Mukusick directed Susan Hsu to get blood from Henrietta’s family, she didn’t make sure Day and his children knew why the blood was being obtained, and they didn’t give their informed consent. Day believed Hsu was extracting blood to see if they had the same disease that killed Henrietta, despite Hsu knowing there was no cancer test. MucKusick sought to figure out what HLA markers Henrietta had. Since this happened in 1973, the NIG principles for informed consent and review board approval have been enshrined into law. MuKusick and Hsu published the results of their research in Science, mapping the genetic markers of Henrietta Lacks and her family (husband and children), something that no scientist today would undertake because revealing a person’s name and genetic information would violate HIPAA.
References
Choi, T. M., Wallace, S. W., & Wang, Y. (2018). Big data analytics in operations management. Production and Operations Management, 27(10), 1868-1883
Skloot, R. (2014). The Woman In Immortial Life. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/secretlife/blogposts/the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks-book-excerpt-part3
Part 2 reflection
- Select 2 points that the author makes that you may agree or disagree with and explain why. Relate your points to contemporary perspectives in health care qualitative oversight and support them with sources.
One thing that aroused my curiosity was that Henrietta’s case had two major flaws: the inability to conceal the cell line’s identification and failing to get patient permission. I agree with Lantos that what Henrietta had gone through back in the 1950s was a fairly frequent practice and, for the most part, partially legal, given the insufficiency of laws at the time. Consent was viewed as a matter of autonomy rather than justice at the time. If Henrietta did not consent to harvest her cells, no one should profit from it to save her family. Would scientists have been able to develop a Polio treatment if this had been the case? Human tissue research, ownership, and consent have many ” grey areas” in today’s culture.
Compared to the 1950s, today’s standards are much better designed for adopting informed consent, ethical procedures, and protections that prohibit certain activities that people, including Henrietta, had previously undergone. Lantos’ remark about Rebecca Skloot’s book about Henrietta and her family. He claims that “Skloot’s brilliant journey of discovery of the starts to seem as exploitative as the discoveries of the scientists 50 years earlier” (Lantos, 2016). While I understand his point of view because she will profit from book sales, I do not agree that her writing the book was intended to be exploitative.
Reference
Lantos, J.D. (2016). Thirteen Ways of Looking at Henrietta Lacks. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 59(2).