For the Good of Mankind? by Vicki Oransky Wittenstein

As part of her rich back matter, Vicki puts forth a series of insightful questions for readers to explore and debate for further analytical engagement with the topic. Josef Mengele, the radiation experiments of the World War II and Cold War eras, and the ethical challenges of twenty-first-century drug trials and experiments with human biological samples. Starting with an overview of basic medical ethics, Vicki goes on to meticulously document human medical experimentation across the centuries, including Jenner’s early smallpox experiments, the horrors of experimentation on American slaves, the concentration camp atrocities of Dr. In a new TFCB fall release, entitled For the Good of Mankind? The Shameful History of Human Medical Experimentation, Vicki Oransky Wittenstein chronicles Lacks’s experience, along with a wide range of related instances of gross ethical and moral violations in the pursuit of medical knowledge. Just this year, the National Institutes of Health and the Lacks family have come to an agreement that offers the family some control over how Lacks’s genome (sequenced from the HeLa cells) is used. Researchers the world over have used-are using-HeLa cells for a wide range of medical research. Lacks’s cervical cells, harvested at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s without her knowledge or her consent, became the foundation of an incredibly rich line of rapidly reproducing and hardy cells (called HeLa cells).

I learned about a woman named Henrietta Lacks from reading Rebecca Skloot’s best-seller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which came out in 2010.

For the Good of Mankind? by Vicki Oransky Wittenstein