Medical Ethics

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? 
          
Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

Through a combination of the illuminating overviews composed by the editor and readings drawn from important traditional and contemporary sources, MacKinnon's ETHICS provides students with an introduction to both ethical theory and the moral debates surrounding a variety of contemporary issues. Edited with the intention of providing reader friendly, but not superficial, access to many complex concepts, ETHICS is a comprehensive and clear-sighted introduction to both the general and specific guises ethical deliberation is obliged to take.

This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.

Law and Ethics for Medical Careers, Fifth Edition, provides an overview of the laws and ethics you should know to help you give competent, compassionate care to patients that is within acceptable legal and ethical boundaries. The text can also serve as a guide to help you resolve the many legal and ethical questions you may reasonably expect to face as a student and, later, as a health care practitioner. The text features pertinent legal cases, anecdotes, and sidebars related to health-related careers. Content has been updated and special attention has been paid to legislation affecting health care.

Building on the best-selling tradition of previous editions, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, Sixth Edition, provides a highly original, practical, and insightful guide to morality in the health professions. Acclaimed authors Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress thoroughly develop and advocate for four principles that lie at the core of moral reasoning in health care: respect for autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice. Drawing from contemporary research--and integrating detailed case studies and vivid real-life examples and scenarios--they demonstrate how these prima facie principles can be expanded to apply to various conflicts and dilemmas, from how to deliver bad news to whether or not to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatments.
Illuminating both theory and method throughout, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, Sixth Edition, considers what constitutes moral character and addresses the problem of moral status: what rights are due to people and animals, and when. It also examines the professional-patient relationship, surveys major philosophical theories--including utilitarianism, Kantianism, rights theory, and Communitarianism--and describes methods of moral justification in bioethics. Ideal for courses in biomedical ethics, bioethics, and health care ethics, the text is enhanced by hundreds of annotated citations and a substantial introduction that clarifies key terms and concepts.

Features of the Sixth Edition:
* Integrates case studies throughout the text, rather than presenting them in an appendix as in previous editions
* A new chapter on moral status (Chapter 3)
* Extensively revised and expanded material on the theory of the common morality (Chapters 1 and 10)
* A reworked discussion of the ethics of care as a form of virtue ethics (Chapter 2)
* Revised and updated treatments of nonmaleficence and beneficence, which take into account recent legal and philosophical literature and discussions (Chapters 5 and 6)
* A new section on vulnerability and exploitation as it applies to justice (Chapter 7)
* A more concise treatment of the principles of biomedical ethics throughout the text, featuring developed, refined, and modified perspectives

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner (Nonfiction)
PEN/Oakland Award Winner
BCALA Nonfiction Award Winner
Gustavus Meyers Award Winner

From the era of slavery to the present day, the first full history of black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment.

Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions.
The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused black Americans to view researchers—and indeed the whole medical establishment—with such deep distrust. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read Medical Apartheid, a masterful book that will stir up both controversy and long-needed debate.

ISBN-13: 978-1-55810-258-3 SAN: 851-3481 2010 Reissue Brand New