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...the CLOSURE FAIRY
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Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Reflections: A Dilemma of Medical Ethics
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My friend Michele Battle-Fisher first made me aware of the story of Henrietta Lack and the cell line created using tissue from her body in a recent post on Facebook. The ethical questions raised by Henrietta’s story are both interesting and thorny. This week’s Sunday New York Times book review includes a review of a recent book documenting the history of that cell line, the moral and legal implications of its continued existence, and the almost uncanny implications that this version of “immortality” has had for Henrietta’s descendants.
I have chosen to post the following excerpts from this book review, both because the story is worthy of some thought in and of itself, and also because the final excerpt below highlights nicely the dichotomy between this country’s world-class medical technology, and its shameful failures in the area of health care delivery. This remains a distinction that is all-too-rarely made by politicians debating the issue.
To set the scene, here are the two opening paragraphs of the NY Times review:
From the very beginning there was something uncanny about the cancer cells on Henrietta Lacks’s cervix. Even before killing Lacks herself in 1951, they took on a life of their own. Removed during a biopsy and cultured without her permission, the HeLa cells (named from the first two letters of her first and last names) reproduced boisterously in a lab at Johns Hopkins — the first human cells ever to do so. HeLa became an instant biological celebrity, traveling to research labs all over the world. Meanwhile Lacks, a vivacious 31-year-old African-American who had once been a tobacco farmer, tended her five children and endured scarring radiation treatments in the hospital’s “colored” ward.
After Henrietta Lacks’s death, HeLa went viral, so to speak, becoming the godmother of virology and then biotech, benefiting practically anyone who’s ever taken a pill stronger than aspirin. Scientists have grown some 50 million metric tons of her cells, and you can get some for yourself simply by calling an 800 number. HeLa has helped build thousands of careers, not to mention more than 60,000 scientific studies, with nearly 10 more being published every day, revealing the secrets of everything from aging and cancer to mosquito mating and the cellular effects of working in sewers.
The next excerpt capsulizes the current state of the law with reference to the use of “medical waste” for research purposes:
In the 1980s a doctor who had removed the cancer-ridden spleen of a man named John Moore patented some of the cells to create a cell line then valued at more than $3 billion, without Moore’s knowledge. Moore sued, and on appeal the court ruled that patients had the right to control their tissues, but soon that was struck down by the California Supreme Court, which said that tissue removed from the body had been abandoned as medical waste. The cell line created by the doctor had been “transformed” via his “inventive effort,” and to say otherwise would “destroy the economic incentive to conduct important medical research.” The court said that doctors should disclose their financial interests and called on legislators to increase patient protections and regulation, but this has hardly hindered the growth of the field. In 1999 the RAND Corporation estimated that American labs alone held more than 307 million tissue samples from some 178 million people. Not only is the question of payment for profitable tissues unresolved, Skloot notes, but it’s still not necessary to obtain consent to store cells and tissue taken in diagnostic procedures and then use the samples for research.
Finally, we can see the strange predicament of Henrietta’s surviving family, as reflected in the words of her daughter, Deborah:
[Skloot] tacks between the perspective of the scientists and the family evenly and fairly, arriving at a paradox described by Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. “Truth be told, I can’t get mad at science, because it help people live, and I’d be a mess without it. I’m a walking drugstore! . . . But I won’t lie, I would like some health insurance so I don’t got to pay all that money every month for drugs my mother cells probably helped make.”
To sum up: the next time you hear a politician insisting that we have “the best health care system in the world” stop and ask yourself how and why—if that boilerplate is true—we can so easily, as a society, tolerate the cruel irony at the heart of the circumstance in which Henrietta’s daughter can’t afford her needed medications.
Your thoughts welcomed: irodak47@gmail.com
X
My friend Michele Battle-Fisher first made me aware of the story of Henrietta Lack and the cell line created using tissue from her body in a recent post on Facebook. The ethical questions raised by Henrietta’s story are both interesting and thorny. This week’s Sunday New York Times book review includes a review of a recent book documenting the history of that cell line, the moral and legal implications of its continued existence, and the almost uncanny implications that this version of “immortality” has had for Henrietta’s descendants.
I have chosen to post the following excerpts from this book review, both because the story is worthy of some thought in and of itself, and also because the final excerpt below highlights nicely the dichotomy between this country’s world-class medical technology, and its shameful failures in the area of health care delivery. This remains a distinction that is all-too-rarely made by politicians debating the issue.
To set the scene, here are the two opening paragraphs of the NY Times review:
From the very beginning there was something uncanny about the cancer cells on Henrietta Lacks’s cervix. Even before killing Lacks herself in 1951, they took on a life of their own. Removed during a biopsy and cultured without her permission, the HeLa cells (named from the first two letters of her first and last names) reproduced boisterously in a lab at Johns Hopkins — the first human cells ever to do so. HeLa became an instant biological celebrity, traveling to research labs all over the world. Meanwhile Lacks, a vivacious 31-year-old African-American who had once been a tobacco farmer, tended her five children and endured scarring radiation treatments in the hospital’s “colored” ward.
After Henrietta Lacks’s death, HeLa went viral, so to speak, becoming the godmother of virology and then biotech, benefiting practically anyone who’s ever taken a pill stronger than aspirin. Scientists have grown some 50 million metric tons of her cells, and you can get some for yourself simply by calling an 800 number. HeLa has helped build thousands of careers, not to mention more than 60,000 scientific studies, with nearly 10 more being published every day, revealing the secrets of everything from aging and cancer to mosquito mating and the cellular effects of working in sewers.
The next excerpt capsulizes the current state of the law with reference to the use of “medical waste” for research purposes:
In the 1980s a doctor who had removed the cancer-ridden spleen of a man named John Moore patented some of the cells to create a cell line then valued at more than $3 billion, without Moore’s knowledge. Moore sued, and on appeal the court ruled that patients had the right to control their tissues, but soon that was struck down by the California Supreme Court, which said that tissue removed from the body had been abandoned as medical waste. The cell line created by the doctor had been “transformed” via his “inventive effort,” and to say otherwise would “destroy the economic incentive to conduct important medical research.” The court said that doctors should disclose their financial interests and called on legislators to increase patient protections and regulation, but this has hardly hindered the growth of the field. In 1999 the RAND Corporation estimated that American labs alone held more than 307 million tissue samples from some 178 million people. Not only is the question of payment for profitable tissues unresolved, Skloot notes, but it’s still not necessary to obtain consent to store cells and tissue taken in diagnostic procedures and then use the samples for research.
Finally, we can see the strange predicament of Henrietta’s surviving family, as reflected in the words of her daughter, Deborah:
[Skloot] tacks between the perspective of the scientists and the family evenly and fairly, arriving at a paradox described by Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. “Truth be told, I can’t get mad at science, because it help people live, and I’d be a mess without it. I’m a walking drugstore! . . . But I won’t lie, I would like some health insurance so I don’t got to pay all that money every month for drugs my mother cells probably helped make.”
To sum up: the next time you hear a politician insisting that we have “the best health care system in the world” stop and ask yourself how and why—if that boilerplate is true—we can so easily, as a society, tolerate the cruel irony at the heart of the circumstance in which Henrietta’s daughter can’t afford her needed medications.
Your thoughts welcomed: irodak47@gmail.com
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Friday, February 5, 2010
Remembrances: You Are There
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"All things are as they were then, except... You Are There."
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"All things are as they were then, except... You Are There."
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Your thoughts welcomed: irodak47@gmail.com
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Thursday, February 4, 2010
The Riffs Redesigned
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Rodak Riffs no longer features comment boxes. I am no longer soliciting published comments. If you wish to have a conversation with me regarding something I've posted, or regarding something that came to your mind because of something I posted, or just because you think I'm a fine fucking fellow (FFF), please send me an email. Or use my Facebook account. Or use my Twitter account. You will find the means to choose one of these options on the sidebar. If you wish to have a conversation with somebody else, you're on your own.
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Rodak Riffs no longer features comment boxes. I am no longer soliciting published comments. If you wish to have a conversation with me regarding something I've posted, or regarding something that came to your mind because of something I posted, or just because you think I'm a fine fucking fellow (FFF), please send me an email. Or use my Facebook account. Or use my Twitter account. You will find the means to choose one of these options on the sidebar. If you wish to have a conversation with somebody else, you're on your own.
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Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Readings: Graduate Students, Beware!
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The excerpt which follows is taken from a long footnote, on pp.97-98, of Junot Díaz’s great novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The footnote documents the sorry fate of one Jesús de Galíndez “a Columbia University grad student who had written a rather unsettling doctoral dissertation. The topic? Lamentably, unfortunately, sadly: the era of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina.”
Let this be fair warning to all you ABDs out there:
Long story short: upon learning of the dissertation, El Jefe first tried to buy the thing and when that failed he dispatched his chief Nazgul (the sepulchral Felix Bernardino) to NYC and within days Galíndez got gagged, bagged, and dragged to La Capital, and legend has it when he came out of his chloroform nap he found himself naked, dangling from his feet over a cauldron of boiling oil, El Jefe standing nearby with a copy of the offending dissertation in hand. (And you thought your committee was rough.)
Enough said?
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The excerpt which follows is taken from a long footnote, on pp.97-98, of Junot Díaz’s great novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The footnote documents the sorry fate of one Jesús de Galíndez “a Columbia University grad student who had written a rather unsettling doctoral dissertation. The topic? Lamentably, unfortunately, sadly: the era of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina.”
Let this be fair warning to all you ABDs out there:
Long story short: upon learning of the dissertation, El Jefe first tried to buy the thing and when that failed he dispatched his chief Nazgul (the sepulchral Felix Bernardino) to NYC and within days Galíndez got gagged, bagged, and dragged to La Capital, and legend has it when he came out of his chloroform nap he found himself naked, dangling from his feet over a cauldron of boiling oil, El Jefe standing nearby with a copy of the offending dissertation in hand. (And you thought your committee was rough.)
Enough said?
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Monday, February 1, 2010
Rants: Turn Out the Lights, the Party's Over
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There doesn't seem to be much worth talking about in the political realm any more. The whole game has now been so transparently exposed for the sham that it is, that it is impossible to discuss it as though it had any legitimacy.
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I see the recent SCOTUS decision as the nose under the tent of eventual one-party rule--i.e., "the Corporate Party"--and I'm quite certain that following the nose comes the hump(ing).
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To the extent that an Obama is opposed to the "System," he is largely powerless to do anything about it. The fact that he has these congressional majorities and still can't get anything done ("He can't lead, Gladys!") is due largely to the fact that he is the most legitimately "grassroots" POTUS that we've had in my lifetime. Much of his campaign war chest came from individual, small donations. And much of his organization was done by actual engaged citizens, rather than by union operatives and the usual crowd of partisan hacks.
X
This looks like a good thing--"democracy in action"--until one comes to realize that by trumping "the game" with actual democracy, we have elected a man with no power. He has no chits to call in. He has done no favors in the past for powerful men, upon whom he can now call to scratch HIS back. He can state his goals as eloquently as hell, but he can't get them enacted as legislation, because he has no political leverage. The Dems in congress can't be pressured by the White House to risk displeasing their corporate sponsors, because Obama has no means of punishing them for non-compliance.
X
All the Republicans need to do is stonewall while Obama fails, and then get swept back into power, big-time, by the now limitless access to corporate money that those who go-along-to-get-along will enjoy. It's over. America will soon be a one-party vassal state, or else the perpetrator of WWIII in an attempt to get out of debt by killing the lender.
X
This is a good time to be getting old.
_____________________________
Cross-posted in the comments section here.
X
There doesn't seem to be much worth talking about in the political realm any more. The whole game has now been so transparently exposed for the sham that it is, that it is impossible to discuss it as though it had any legitimacy.
X
I see the recent SCOTUS decision as the nose under the tent of eventual one-party rule--i.e., "the Corporate Party"--and I'm quite certain that following the nose comes the hump(ing).
X
To the extent that an Obama is opposed to the "System," he is largely powerless to do anything about it. The fact that he has these congressional majorities and still can't get anything done ("He can't lead, Gladys!") is due largely to the fact that he is the most legitimately "grassroots" POTUS that we've had in my lifetime. Much of his campaign war chest came from individual, small donations. And much of his organization was done by actual engaged citizens, rather than by union operatives and the usual crowd of partisan hacks.
X
This looks like a good thing--"democracy in action"--until one comes to realize that by trumping "the game" with actual democracy, we have elected a man with no power. He has no chits to call in. He has done no favors in the past for powerful men, upon whom he can now call to scratch HIS back. He can state his goals as eloquently as hell, but he can't get them enacted as legislation, because he has no political leverage. The Dems in congress can't be pressured by the White House to risk displeasing their corporate sponsors, because Obama has no means of punishing them for non-compliance.
X
All the Republicans need to do is stonewall while Obama fails, and then get swept back into power, big-time, by the now limitless access to corporate money that those who go-along-to-get-along will enjoy. It's over. America will soon be a one-party vassal state, or else the perpetrator of WWIII in an attempt to get out of debt by killing the lender.
X
This is a good time to be getting old.
_____________________________
Cross-posted in the comments section here.
X
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