What is the content? Cells were taken without consent but from tissue already moved from her (as part of her treatment), but that might not have been an issue ethically then.
It is now. You, currently, may or may not have an absolute right to control of your bodily materials. That has yet to be clearly defined by US law, as the existing case law is extremely chequered and inconsistent. As such, had it not been settled in this fashion but rather showed up in an open courtroom, the resulting ruling could have had considerable implications for all of us. It was always an ethical issue, and even to a lesser degree a legal issue, some people have always objected to the idea of having their bodily fluids taken or what will be done with them. These kinds of concerns predate the medical system itself, as any Victorian grave robber shanty or New England witch bottle can testify. The reason it wasn't a legal issue in this case until a much later date was becase it was being done secretly. Why secretly, I wonder, if you earnestly believe that no one had or would have had ethical objections at the time? And whether the past exploitation of the disadvantaged - racial minorities are important in this discussion but certainly not the
only group minoritized by this system - as pharmaceutical test animals is/was a practice deserving of renumeration or not is similarly as yet unresolved. Those, plus the best selling book about Lack's case, are the reasons a lot of people were carefully watching for the outcome of this suit.
Huge gains in science came from the cells, but it wasn't because the cells were a cheat code and just shoved into new treatments. The gains came from studies regarding the cells.
That is not how the actual law works. I can't use someone's data let alone their physical body without their permission just because I think my work is important, or because I think my use of their stolen data makes the results of my study is novel.
The people who took the cells didn't sell it.
And consequently have not been sued nor come to any sort of settlement. This is about a company, Thermo-Fisher, that took those illicitly donated materials and absolutely
did resell them for billions of dollars in profit. A company that has now admitted fault, and settled with the litigants. As they should and did. Had they, like Johns Hopkins themselves, passed along charitably to patients what had been charitably donated to them, the Lacks family would have had no prayer of establishing standing for a lawsuit, at least not against Thermo-Fisher.
The one piece of content we don't know is if there was a pay out (or magnitude) by the pharma company.
That's not even the most important part of the story, but presumably "settlement" includes some manner of "pay out" if that is your only priority here.
Making this all about race, and trying to slot it in to some media friendly mythical narrative about lottery sized payouts to druggie welfare queens or what have you, is a disingenuous read to the core. Racial bias and prejudice had a lot to do with why JHU believed stealing samples from Henrietta Lacks was a victimless crime, this is true, and I don't want to discount the importance of our national conversation on institutional racism in medicine. But at the same time, if you think that is the only part of this story worth talking about, I strongly disagree. And if you think whiny Blacks need to just shut the hell up about any samples taken from them before modern consent laws really started to take form - about ten years ago, let's be clear - then we really
really disagree. And I don't see how victim blaming would help resolve the underlying issue in any way, as not all potential litigants who have fallen victim to similar schemes have been Black in any case. John Moore certainly wasn't, but I don't know about the others I referenced.
