Contrast this with James Harrison, who, voluntarily and for no compensation, donated his blood plasma once every three weeks for 57 years, because his blood was unusually good for medicine:
It is fashionable to treat the smallest misstep of the doctors trying to save her life, and the lives of countless others, as some unforgivable harm. But I don't buy it.
Why so confident? I would never try to extort people who cured a bunch of diseases using cancer tissue from me or my parents. I also wouldn't want society to treat me as a hero for something I didn't do:
> Some people are going to tell me I’m underplaying the race angle, and that black women need heroes. I think this is the worst part. There are thousands of black female doctors, black female scientists, etc. Whenever we recognize white people who have contributed to medicine, it’s Brilliant Dr. So-And-So Who Cured A Deadly Disease. What message does it send black women if the most prominent medical hero that society gives them is someone with zero medical ability or medicine-related-virtues, whose only contribution was passively letting someone else take a clump of their cells without her knowledge? Did you know a black woman, Mattiedna Johnson, helped cure scarlet fever? No you did not, because whenever people want to talk about black women in medicine they talk about Henrietta Lacks - who was not, technically, in medicine.
Funny how quickly you reach for hyperbole - if you own a plot of land and people discover some ore or treasure there, are you an "extortioner" for asking a share of its value? So when someone extract value from a piece of your body, it shouldn't apply? (And I am talking about moral, not legal ideals)
I give blood too, and I had some genetic testing done on my cells. I signed a paper to allow further use of both for research. There's a reason we implemented such obligations.
But the mere fact you went hyperbolic - nothing to do with disgust at a *black* *woman* daring to ask for money, huh? There's a lot of words you could have used - "ask for", "request", "demand" but you went straight for "extort" - when there is no constraint, nothing has been done, and the moral failure is clearly on the side of the people who took and used the cells and clearly gained money and social status with them.
I gave blood plenty of times, i.e. 'skin'. If one day doctors told me "oh by the way, we made the Polio vaccine using some of your blood, but didn't ask permission", I can confidently say I wouldn't mind. I'm not going to pretend the opportunistic feigned victimhood conjured around that case has any merit, as if giving a cell sample is something so unimaginable, that nobody else could possibly know how they would feel about it, unless it happened to them.
It is strange to me how in the last few decades ‘hero’ and ‘victim’ have gotten muddle together. I believe that a hero has to actively do something important in spite of great personal risk to himself which he recognises. As an example, a heroic teacher might run into a burning school to save a child, but a teacher who goes into a build to fetch a kid in the ordinary course of his job, without knowing that there is a hidden fire elsewhere in the building, isn’t being heroic (at least not yet). Heroism isn’t passive: the hero has to have a choice.
A victim is someone who experiences something bad done to him. Mrs. Lacks was a victim of medical practices we would not support today. She didn’t have a choice: indeed, it was the failure to respect her right to choose the disposition of her remains which was the injustice she suffered.
I know I'm not actually engaging with the substance of this post (because it isn't worth it, sorry – not one of his good ones) but it's interesting to note that people are suddenly posting all sorts of spicy things. Feels like people are doing victory laps about "death of DEI".
And the thing is... the things they're posting are really boring. Like pg's "origin of Woke" that even HN dragged.
I get people's point that the past 10 years have stifled interesting discussion. Well, let's see it then. Show me the interesting discussion. This is not it.
> people are suddenly posting all sorts of spicy things
I don't think this is particularly spicy. What posts are you thinking of? pg has criticized woke for at least a decade so that's not a new thing either.
It's a two years old post, referencing an (admittedly silly) legal case that's two years older again. I don't know why it's even made the front page, whole thing feels strawmannish.
But yeah, congratulations to the anti-DEI mob, you can now make comedies again where the punchline is "a man is wearing a dress" or "look at his funny foreign accent".
Whoop-de-doo, that shit was getting plain tired years before it ever got cancelled.
It’s problematic to make assumptions about someone who isn’t here to speak for themselves. While the unauthorized use of medical samples without consent is clearly unethical, neither heroizing nor victimizing Henrietta Lacks accurately represents her role. The unique properties of her cells don’t justify their collection and use without permission.
I have to give him some credit, after he said something that seemed totally hypocritical I instantly thought "What is he some Marxist now that a black woman's family might have some valuable property?" but read on and he made exactly the same point I would about getting rich finding oil.
Would respect him more if he'd realised that made the whole thing not worth writing about, but I guess he just couldn't let it go.
I only skimmed the article but it seems like the idea that Lacks was a "Scientific Hero" is something the author implies was implied by others and then goes on to argue that it isn't the case. This strikes me as disingenuous, a way of trying to rally against sympathy for her case by addressing a claim made up by the author.
He gave many examples of people treating her as a her as a hero. Eg:
> United States Rep. Kwesi Mfume (D-Md) filed legislation to posthumously award the Congressional Gold Medal to Henrietta Lacks for her distinguished contributions to science. The award is one of the most prestigious civilian honors given by the United States government
They gave the medal to everyone who died in 9/11, and while I think there was probably several acts of heroism involved on the day, the aim there seems to be recognizing victims more than heros.
But the actual criteria for the medal is nothing to do with heroism:
> made a major and long-standing impact on American history and culture.
Which I think is a bar she (and 9/11 victims) clears easily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harrison_(blood_donor)
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