And they are. [One of my several backgrounders, here.] But bit by bit. . . restorative justice is coming, in America -- for families like the Lacks:
. . .Lacks’ only surviving child, Lawrence Lacks Sr., lives to see justice done, grandson Alfred Lacks Carter Jr. said. Now 86, Lawrence Lacks was 16 when his mother died.
“There couldn’t have been a more fitting day for her to have justice, for her family to have relief,” Carter said. “It was a long fight — over 70 years — and Henrietta Lacks gets her day. . . .”
In a brief filed in support of the Lacks family, attorneys advocating for civil rights, women’s rights and health care equity said the case is one of many in which U.S. doctors and scientists have exploited minority patients. Another example they cited involved James Marion Sims, a 19th century Alabama surgeon heralded as the father of modern gynecology who performed experimental surgeries on a dozen enslaved women without the use of anesthesia, claiming Black people could endure more pain than white people. . . .
“In the same year Mr. Lacks was self-publishing a book in the hopes of finding some help for his family, the CEO of Thermo Fisher received a compensation package of over $26 million,” the brief says. . . .
Thermo Fisher still sells the HeLa cells for a profit -- over seventy years after they were harvested -- and she had died penniless, and without any idea that she is -- in many ways. . . the mother of the research that gave us a polio vaccine. When you know better. . . you do better.
नमस्ते
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