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.
