Henrietta Lacks’s family reaches settlement in extracted cell lawsuit

[laughing dog]

The depiction of Ms Lack’s family as greedy taking advantage of their race to feed their greed is pure bigoted conjecture.

The family hired the racist hearse-chaser Ben Crump as their lawyer. That should tell you all you need to know about the character of the family.

Thanks for the confirmation.

 

[ZiprHead]

In your quite selfish and bigoted opinion.

Ad hominems are not a substitute for arguments.

And I am still waiting for any citations backing up the claims about that location not following any standards or having been warned by the franchise to lower their temperature.

Not an ad hom. I'm addressing your bigoted opinion. Virtually every post you've made in this thread has been dripping with it.

 

[laughing dog]

In your quite selfish and bigoted opinion.

Ad hominems are not a substitute for arguments.

And I am still waiting for any citations backing up the claims about that location not following any standards or having been warned by the franchise to lower their temperature.

If you read your own link, McDonald’s had lots of burn reports from their coffee.

The jury award was mostly for punitive damages that a judge drastically reduced.

 

[Politesse]

I'm confused -- does Derec think Stella Liebeck was Black? I thought his whole thing was that punitive damages are only awarded to people of African descent?

 

[Derec]

Not an ad hom. I'm addressing your bigoted opinion. Virtually every post you've made in this thread has been dripping with it.

It hasn't. That is just your misguided and bigoted opinion.

 

[Derec]

I'm confused --

What else is new?

does Derec think Stella Liebeck was Black?

No. But it was still a wrongly decided case.

I thought his whole thing was that punitive damages are only awarded to people of African descent?

When did I say that? You need to work on your reading comprehension.
I said that only blacks can get millions in cases such as police shooting their thug relatives justifiably or for playing race card for trivial things with little damages like getting kicked out of a wine tasting. I never said it applies to all lawsuit lotteries.

 

[Derec]

If you read your own link, McDonald’s had lots of burn reports from their coffee.

I read it. Unlike you, I also understand what it means.
~700 people injured themselves over a ten year period. McD has served billions of coffees over that interval, for a very low injury rate.
That number shows how safe McD coffee was, not how dangerous.

The jury award was mostly for punitive damages that a judge drastically reduced.

McD should not have been held liable at all. She spilled coffee on herself. McD did not spill it onto her.
We do not know how much the final payout to greedy Stella was anyway, but it certainly was big.

And lawsuits like this are a good reason why punitive damages should be abolished. If a company violates regulations (and no, there were no regulations against serving hot coffee) the proper way would be to impose well-defined fines, not as part of a tort lawsuit where juries can just make stuff up from whether the coffee was too hot to how much money to give to the plaintiff and their shyster.

The only ones benefitting from the present system are the trial lawyers and select few lucky plaintiffs. The power of the trial lawyer lobby is why it persists. Unfortunately, most US politicians are lawyers.

 

[Jarhyn]

Litigation focused on scientific breakthroughs and profits made on cells extracted without Lacks’s consent.

Descendants of Henrietta Lacks, the Black woman whose cells have been central to decades of important scientific breakthroughs, settled litigation with a biotechnology company that had allegedly profited from the cells despite knowing that they were extracted from her without her consent, attorneys for both parties said.

Terms of the litigation, filed against Thermo Fisher Scientific, were not released.

The parties released the same statement:
“Members of the family of Henrietta Lacks and Thermo Fisher have agreed to settle the litigation filed by Henrietta Lacks’ Estate in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. The terms of the agreement will be confidential. The parties are pleased that they were able to find a way to resolve this matter outside of Court and will have no further comment.”

A settlement conference had been scheduled for Monday, according to federal court records.

“Her cells were robbed from her body,” one of the family’s attorneys, Ben Crump, said at a news conference Tuesday morning, what would have been Lacks’s 103rd birthday.
Lacks was only 31 and an East Baltimore mother of five when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951. While being treated in a segregated ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital, a doctor took a sample of her tumor without her consent and gave it to a research team.

The team soon discovered the cells in her sample had a remarkable ability to grow outside the human body, opening up a universe of medical research. Johns Hopkins shared the “HeLa” cells with other researchers; vaccines for polio to covid-19 were developed with these cells, as were cancer treatments, in vitro fertilization.

Neither Lacks nor her family knew any of this. She died soon after her diagnosis on Oct. 4, 1951.
In 2013, German scientists sequenced Lacks’s genome.
For decades, they struggled to carry on without their mother. One of her daughters, Elsie, who was disabled, was institutionalized and died at 15 years old in 1955. In the 1970s, two decades after Lacks’s death, members of her family started getting strange phone calls from researchers requesting blood samples. Their medical histories were published in research papers without their knowledge. One night, at a dinner party, a guest asked family members if they were related to the source of the famous HeLa cells. That’s how they found out cells from their mother were still alive all over the world.

I hope the family made a fortune from this theft of their mother's property.

I am of two minds of this... One, that consent should be sought before accessing something not normally made publicly available.

Two, that NOBODY ought be able to claim *ownership* over DNA, not even the person whose body it originated from.

I think I disagree here. I haven't finished rolling it around in my head... but I'm pretty sure I want to claim ownership of my DNA, and that nobody else should have any right to claim any part of my DNA ever.

To me, the latter of these represents an important advancement in the ethics surrounding DNA usage, in that it would cut for-profit genetic research off at the knees, since none of its products could be owned any more than the DNA itself.

This is very important to me, because largely the profit motive is the major corruptor of DNA based research, be it humans or soybeans.

Then I would say the same about AI models.

Essentially, I think removing the profit motive -- the ability to claim IP -- is the solution here. At that point the only people working in the space will be those who wish to give the world a gift rather than those who see the world as a gift given wholely to them.

Mmmmmmmm.... Are you under the impression that China just wants to give the world gifts? They are some of the absolute worst violators when it comes to using other people's IP without permission or recompense.

I don't believe in the very idea of IP. I believe in the relative merit in attempting to do more out-of-distribution work, and so cast aspersions on copying for THAT reason, the reason of profiteering against the economy of scale with low quality knockoffs... But that is very different from accepting that anyone can own *facts of nature*.

I cast judgement against China not for making knockoffs, but for making cheap knockoffs.

 

[laughing dog]

If you read your own link, McDonald’s had lots of burn reports from their coffee.

I read it. Unlike you, I also understand what it means.
~700 people injured themselves over a ten year period. McD has served billions of coffees over that interval, for a very low injury rate.
That number shows how safe McD coffee was, not how dangerous.

No, coffee should not produce any serious injuries. Duh.

 

[Derec]

No, coffee should not produce any serious injuries. Duh.

It can if you carelessly spill it over yourself.

 

[Shadowy Man]

If you read your own link, McDonald’s had lots of burn reports from their coffee.

I read it. Unlike you, I also understand what it means.
~700 people injured themselves over a ten year period. McD has served billions of coffees over that interval, for a very low injury rate.
That number shows how safe McD coffee was, not how dangerous.

this is a familiar argument around here: so few people are hurt by this there’s no need for regulations.

 

[Derec]

this is a familiar argument around here: so few people are hurt by this there’s no need for regulations.

There may or may be a need for regulations of coffee temperature. I was objecting to the Hound's assertion that 700 injured people is a lot when the denominator is in the billions.

I think regulatory enforcement with clear regulations and fine schedules is a far better system than the haphazard system of arbitrary and capricious punitive damage awards based on nothing but jurors' opinions.

 

[Gospel]

Had Henrietta Lack not been black, her cells wouldn't have been harvested and used in such a way without her consent or even being informed!

Very doubtful, given the era. Asking consent to use cell lines was not a common practice.
But had she been white her greedy relatives could not play the race card to shake the company down for millions.

If black people hadn't experienced the discrimination they have, their 'race card' wouldn't exist.

 

[laughing dog]

No, coffee should not produce any serious injuries. Duh.

It can if you carelessly spill it over yourself.

That is non-responsive to my comment.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Had the family not been black they likely wouldn’t have stolen the cells from her in the first place. They possibly didn’t see her as enough of a person to require her consent. Black privilege, indeed.

My understanding is that back then (Lacks died in 1951) there was no requirement for consent to use cell lines and that it would not have been handled differently no matter her color. Do you know otherwise?

So there should be a good record of white women getting their cells take for research without their consent, yes? They should sue, too, it would seem.

Many cell lines exist and it's unlikely they had consent for any of them. It's just hers is notable due to how pervasive they became.

 

[TomC]

cell lines exist and it's unlikely they had consent for any of them. It's just hers is notable due to how pervasive they became

Also, that anyone remembered where they came from. Had the strain of cancer cells become known by a string of numbers instead of HeLa, the legal sharks couldn't have sunk their teeth in.
Tom

 

[Gospel]

cell lines exist and it's unlikely they had consent for any of them. It's just hers is notable due to how pervasive they became

Also, that anyone remembered where they came from. Had the strain of cancer cells become known by a string of numbers instead of HeLa, the legal sharks couldn't have sunk their teeth in.
Tom

Medical science tends to view tracking cells as important. Thus ya know, they were able to reach out to the family line to help get through contamination. The error made was the disclosure of genetic information pertaining to the descendants of Henrietta Lacks, which consequently attracted the attention of what you've termed as 'legal sharks'.

You're looking at it from the wrong side of the fence Wilson.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Why in the fuck is it even necessary to have to say this?! This has been explained over and over and over... here... at this web board. The McDonalds' case was lampooned in an effort to help drive the "need" for litigation reform. The elderly woman messed up... in a parked car. She shouldn't have suffered third degree burns and required skin grafts! And asked only for medical compensation!!!

Said a dozen times here, and Derec still has to trot out the misinformation.

The coffee was too hot--she wouldn't have been hurt as badly had it been of the right temperature. She still would have been hurt, though--this wasn't a case of their actions making her action dangerous.

I do believe they bear some responsibility, but I think she bears the majority of the responsibility--and I don't think one should get to collect in a case where you bear most of the wrong.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't believe in the very idea of IP. I believe in the relative merit in attempting to do more out-of-distribution work, and so cast aspersions on copying for THAT reason, the reason of profiteering against the economy of scale with low quality knockoffs... But that is very different from accepting that anyone can own *facts of nature*.

I cast judgement against China not for making knockoffs, but for making cheap knockoffs.

The problem with knock-offs is that one company goes to a lot of work designing something and the knock-off company just copies that.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Why in the fuck is it even necessary to have to say this?! This has been explained over and over and over... here... at this web board. The McDonalds' case was lampooned in an effort to help drive the "need" for litigation reform. The elderly woman messed up... in a parked car. She shouldn't have suffered third degree burns and required skin grafts! And asked only for medical compensation!!!

Said a dozen times here, and Derec still has to trot out the misinformation.

The coffee was too hot--she wouldn't have been hurt as badly had it been of the right temperature. She still would have been hurt, though--this wasn't a case of their actions making her action dangerous.

I do believe they bear some responsibility, but I think she bears the majority of the responsibility--and I don't think one should get to collect in a case where you bear most of the wrong.

She asked for medical bill coverage.