Water

[Kevin L]

Our govt has done a lot of questionable and just flat out wrong things over the years in the guise of ‘national interests’. Unfortunately I am sure they will continue in one form or another. I’m not much on conspiracy theories, but the govt is run by people, and people are capable of really bad things.
Oprah just did a movie about a black woman who was an unusual match for cancer research. They used her tissues for decades in medical research, all without consent from her or the family.

You're talking about a woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died from an aggressive cervical cancer in the 1950s.

I heard about the body story that I just relayed in a book about Henrietta Lacks that was written by Rebecca Skloot.

Doctors took her cancer cells without her knowledge or consent, and actually turned them into a multibillion dollar industry.

Her cancer cells made the polio vaccine a reality, and were invaluable in studying and understanding HIV.

In the meantime, researchers lied to the family about tests so that they could get more cells from her descendants in order to compare the genes, and see how things changed over time.

All the while the family is living in poverty with no clue as to what's going on.

 

[Proud Prepper]

Well they know now. What is being done for them now?

 

[Brent S]

I guess I have to see the movie

 

[Kevin L]

I guess I have to see the movie

They have been fighting a lot of things in court.

A few of them are crackheads, others are unemployed.

They have been lied to as recently as the 90s with regards as to why doctors were taking blood samples.

To give you an idea of how often HeLa cells (her cancer cells) were used in research...imagine gathering them all into one mass.

This mass would be bigger than the Empire State Building.

They've used her cells to refine the rabies vaccine, to find a polio vaccine, to cultivate the AIDS virus, to create human cancers in animals, to test and refine chemotherapy drugs, and so on.

Her cells have, literally, saved millions and millions of lives.

The family was kept in the dark, and they donated blood samples to doctors who lied about why they were taking them.

If you want to read about it, look for a book called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It's well worth a read, and isn't the dry, academic stuff that you might expect.