Bp#6 HeLa and Informed Consent

During the reading of Hela, I have started to know the truth under the dark of the medical history.  Before reading this book, I only knew few that some doctors use their patients as research subjects, such as taking away their cells or injecting something into their bodies to observe the results.  I never paid much attention on these things until I read the Hela. Were these doctor wrong? Yes, they were, and a perfect word that could be described, stealing.


Informed consent, as know it and agree it; it means the patient have to understand clearly why the doctor wants his/her cells for, and the patient have to agree it.  Sadly, the doctors in the past never explained the situations as they always had assumed the patients would never understood it. Occasionally, they discovered something interest on the cells like Columbus found the New World, then calming the treasures belong to them but forgot those were from someone else.
John Moorne's case was not any better, his doctor had never been cleared before and after he signed those papers.  It is very hard to deny those researchers' accomplishments; actually, we have to thanks them for the benefits in medicine. However,this cannot be the excuse for doing the wrong.
Not only those researchers and doctors, the pharmaceutical industries are in the same boat.


How about the doctors in today?  There are many new rules(laws) that they have to follow. That's why we have to sign bunch of papers before the treatment.  Although of these rules, I have the feeling that doctors' view to patient has never changed, we are still "subjects" to them (subjects that can talk and bring bunch of annoying rules in behind).

Last, knowing these doctors during their seven years in colleges of medicine probably had turned their logic and knowledge into something else, new laws has been carried out to stop them turn into mad scientists, and hoping the patients will never meet the same tragedy again.