Si están interesados por la ciencia, no se pierdan el presente artículo que trae Nature. Se trata de uno de los casos más apasionantes en torno a las células HeLa y sus genes cuya secuencia ya se conoce. Los descendientes de Henrietta Lack, al parecer, han llegado a un acuerdo con los Institutos de Salud estadounidenses (NIH). ¿Deberían recibir una compensación económica?. El acuerdo al que se llegue marcará jurisprudencia.
Deal done over HeLa cell line
Family of Henrietta Lacks agrees to release of genomic data.
Ewen Callaway en Nature
"Deborah Lacks wanted answers. In 1974, she asked a leading medical geneticist to tell her about HeLa cells, a tissue-culture cell line derived from the cancer that had killed her mother Henrietta in 1951. The researcher, who was collecting blood from the Lacks family to map HeLa genes, autographed a medical textbook he had written and said that everything she needed to know lay within its dense pages.
It would be more than 30 years before the family got a better explanation.
Now the director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Francis Collins, is trying to make up for decades of slights. Over the past four months, he has met Lacks family members to answer questions and to discuss what should be done with genome data from their matriarch’s cell line.
“We wanted to get a better understanding of what information was going to be out there about Henrietta, and what information was going to be out there about us,” says Henrietta’s grandson David Lacks Jr. (Deborah Lacks died in 2009.) On 7 August, Collins announced that the family has endorsed case-by-case release of the information, subject to approval by a committee that will include family members (see
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario