BLACK WOMEN
How the Medical World Robbed a Black Women and Made Immortal Cells
Ethics need to be discussed by all of us
I am mad and sad and feel bad vibes when I hear all the historic and current stories of black women. Perhaps I should make a career for myself becoming the Tin Tin of black women.
The journalist unveiling it all. When things see the light, they transform. I have to believe that. Hope gives life.
First, men banned women from patriarchal religions and society. Saying we are witches just because we have some volatile emotions flying around when we have our menstruations. Emotions are normal, dear stoic men.
Emotions make all people human.
And who wouldn’t be emotional when, in reality, we are just spinning around on a rock with 1037 miles per hour? We feel that in our bones. And it keeps our hearts beating.
Secondly, men did not ask for consent from a black woman to harvest her cancer cells. And now, they refuse to pay her descendants while they get super rich with her immortal cells.
I want to ask your opinion on this matter.
What do you think of the story of Henrietta Lacks?
Henrietta Lacks
The black woman who has been one of the main founders of our current medical cell and cancer research has never seen a penny for her efforts of dying.
A short summary
Henrietta had cervical cancer. Her cells were harvested without her being aware in 1951. She died at the age of 31. Her cells/she became a huge study object after her death. And no one ever even told her descendants.
The cells in science have been called HeLa cells.
“Even though some information about the origins of HeLa’s immortalized cell lines was known to researchers after 1970, the Lacks family was not made aware of the line’s existence until 1975. With knowledge of the cell line’s genetic provenance becoming public, its use for medical research and for commercial purposes continues to raise concerns about privacy and patients’ rights.” — Wikipedia
Henrietta Lacks.
Should she be proud of her immortal cells?
Should her descendants be compensated?
Is this ethical? The commercial purposes worry me deeply. It’s natural cloning you know. And although cloning might have some good purposes if we use it for bamboo and building houses, I don’t think cloning is okay for people.
And how come her cells were taken from poor black Henrietta just so that some company can sell them? If it would have just been for study purposes and cancer research. Okay.
But commercial? NO! I don’t think that’s okay.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m really grateful to Henrietta. She saved many lives of cancer patients. We know much more about cancer popping up in unexpected places. Like rhizomes do. The grassroots of bamboos.
And the study goes on. We live in interesting times.
Immortality
Let me be clear about another detail of this story.
Immortalized cell lines?
What is this? Immortal? Well, these cells clone themselves forever naturally. Cells growing and growing like no tomorrow.
That’s the study now. It’s exploited for research AND used commercially. There are a lot of rich weirdos out there who don’t want to die. They want to know about HeLa cells and how to make them work for their immortality.
Well, my Uncle Oswald is not a weirdo. He just studies stuff. He will die someday. Just not yet. He promised to be around for a while still because May and I love him so much. We keep him alive with our big hugs.
Hugs and good sleeps are a perfect recipe for a long life
Uncle O. is an astrophysicist, and he explains it as follows to me. Entropy in physics has always been seen as degradation. It has to do with thermodynamics. Chaos of the atoms makes the links weaker. And after a while, there’s no movement left.
But there’s also such a thing as Poincare Recurrence Theorem (1890). In 2018, they found out new things about that with quantum physics. Everything returns to its former state exactly when left alone.
Entropy is full regeneration. And happenings return and return just in different forms…
Of course, a cell is not one thing. It consists of many bits and pieces. And together, they go into chaos and come out… healed. Bit different than before. But fully healed. Like skin. Or bones.
That’s transformation. Evolution. Becoming…
And now, the math and physics girls and guys are doubting if we have used the right math for biology and quantum. If we used the right physics to explain stuff. After all, we still don’t really know what gravity is.
We know the apple fell out of the tree. But how did the apple get up there in the first place? How does the blood of a giraffe get to his brain? Pumping? Tight skin? He never gets enough energy from the leaves he eats to make the heart pump like the pumps we make with our current physics laws.
It’s a whole different ball game…
I love to use biology and ecology for my Web3 coding inspiration. To be honest, it’s why I became a coder next to my forklift truck work. 1. the money. 2. the ecology of it. Can sit for hours watching ants spray pheromones and design my algorithms.
In her life, scientist Lynn Margulis (the one of the Gaia Theory together with James Lovelock) always said that we had to look at cells, not genes. And I feel my own cells.
Mind and body start working together after our birth
My heat. My cold. My turbulent emotions.
Well, if you’re a woman with guts, you know that guts and microbes are important for a healthy life. We eat fermented food to keep our microbes happy. Don’t you?
I love my kefir, kimchi and miso.
Genetics are okay, but they crystallized at our birth. They are physical history. After birth, nurture starts, and our environment is more important than our genes.
Sounds logical, huh?
After our birth, everything goes epigenetics. Epigenetics is about the environment and how genes can be switched on or off depending on the complexity of our environment.
“Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence” — CDC
Mind and body start working together after our birth. And food, toxic or healthy buildings, dead or alive drinking water, microbes in our guts, emotions, and thoughts all play a role in our healthy lives.
Hugs are really better than HeLa cells. And Henrietta should have:
- been asked if she allowed her cells to be harvested
- been compensated properly
That’s my unpopular opinion.
Your Opinion
Would you want to be immortal like Henrietta? Would you want your children to be compensated if you were?
Do you think the world is fair for African American people? Or would the same thing have happened if it was a white woman? Or an Asian woman? A tribal woman?
If it were a man? A black man? A poor white homeless man?
Let’s discuss these ethics. After all, together we make the world we live in.
I just say: Black Mothers for President!
Buy me a coffee. Let’s chat.
