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As one of a few physics students among majority of engineer students at Macaulay Honors College at the City College, sometimes my fellow Macaulay students perceive me as a detached from the mundane world person because they think physics is useless in everyday life. And I am not the only science student that faces such prejudice. The society evolved to see scientists and doctors as inhabitants of a different world where they work for a greater good of the humankind and study unimaginable things. Such cultural view has evolved from absence of communication between scientists and the rest of the society, abuse of people by scientists and detachment of scientific world from mundane world. The case of Hanrietta Lacks illustrates why such prejudice against scientists exists.

For biologist the year of birth of HeLa cells, 1951, marked the beginning of a new era where testing on human cells became possible. For Lacks family 1973 marked the beginning of a new era of horror where Henrietta’s cells were alive and used in scientific experiments. Without ability to get answers from John Hopkins hospital, Lacks were left in the darkness for another twenty-seven years. Finally Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, and son, Zakariyya, first saw their mothers cell in the laboratory of Lengauer. However, before Henrietta’s children saw her cells in 2000, Dr. McKusick postdoctoral fellow Susan Hsu contacted Henrietta’s family in 1973. Dr. McKusick needed the blood of Henrietta’s children and husband for genetic experiments that would establish genetic markers of HeLa cells. In other words, Dr. McKusick send his postdoctoral fellow Susan Hsu with heavy English accent to contact Lacks and draw their blood.

The drawing of blood from Lacks started their abuse by the scientists. Lacks understood that their blood would be used to check if they had cancer and did not know that their blood would be used for research. Furthermore, when Deborah came to John Hopkins to give more blood, she met Dr. McKusick who started explaining where Henrietta’s cells were used without giving proper scientific background and gave her signed by him textbook on genetics and a phone number for future blood draw appointments. Such treatment clearly indicates Dr. McKusick ignorance, discourtesy and negligence of people outside of his field of study and people with lack of scientific education. He treated Deborah as a test subject while not giving her and her family courtesy for helping to solve multimillion problem with HeLa contamination. In addition, years later, when Susan Hsu learned about injustice toward Lacks family and her failure to properly explain to Lacks the need for their blood, even though Hsu was sorry for injustice, she was more concerned if she could do more research on Lacks. Therefore, the belief into scientists’ cold-heartedness and detachment from human feeling has a good soil to grow from.

And yet, not all scientists have detached from human feelings. Cancer researcher at John Hopkins Christopher Lengauer invited Henrietta’s children to his laboratory to show HeLa cells. Two of Henrietta’s children, Deborah and Zakariyya, took the offer and, twenty-seven years later since they learned that their mother’s cells were alive saw HeLa cells. Moreover, Lengauer showed where cells were kept, explained what they were used for, biology of a cell, and other necessary information Deborah and Zakariyya needed to understand what HeLa cells meant for scientific community and how they worked. In contrast to previous experience with John Hopkins’ scientists, Lengauer spent time with Deborah and Zakariyya, and, using apprehensible language, he explained science they needed to understand HeLa cells. After all most people outside biology field do not have necessary background in biology to understand the textbook on genetics given to Deborah by Dr. McKusick. So scientists need to learn to communicate with general public. No excuse can justify scientists not trying to explain their work to people outside of their area of study because scientists become a general public the moment they try to understand something outside their area of study. As a conclusion, Lacks case can be used to show how should and should not scientists treat people outside of their research area.

Neither Dr. Wharton nor Dr. Gey did anything wrong by collecting cells from Hanrietta Lacks and growing them in the laboratory. The bigger picture, in 1950 scientists for decades had been trying to grow cell in laboratories without success and collecting samples without patients’ consent. Therefore, in environment where patients’ agreement for taking cell or tissue donor did not exist, Hanrietta Lacks’ case was not an exception from the universal procedure. Moreover, in case of Hanrietta removed samples of tissue did not cause any damage or influenced her disease or her treatment. If Hanrietta’s cell did not survive as millions of cells tested before her, the case of wrong doing by Dr. Wharton and Dr. Gey would not exists. Dr. Wharton and Dr. Gey followed the universal habit of the medical society of that time, taking samples and trying to grow cell, in order to find cells that could be grown to use for experiments and research. Since neither of doctors tried to gain profit from samples taken from anyone in their reach, their actions cannot be considered as a wrong doing because Dr. Gey and Dr. Wharton tried to advance science to help people like Hanrietta, and they collected samples without causing any damage to her health.

Moreover, growing Hanrietta’s cell in the laboratory by Dr. Gey did not cause any physical or emotional damage to Henrietta nor conducted unusual procedure of that time. I cannot deny or overlook emotional tragedy of Hanrietta’s family. However, the tragedy was caused by decades of segregation of American society, people seeking profit and capitalist society. From his side, Dr. Gey made attempts to protect Lacks’ family privacy like by non disclosing Hanrietta’ real name for some decades. For Dr. Gey Hanrietta was nameless donor of cells that he could use for greater good of humankind.

The conflict between science advancement and donor’s permission can be compared to conflict between religion and science advancement in German movie “The Physician.” The movie is about poor Englishman who disguised as a Jew traveled from England to Persia to study medicine from the famous healer. The conflict raised in the movie is between religion and science. More precisely, Islam prohibited opening sacred human bodies and learning God’s secret of man making, while medicine needed to open up bodies to know how to heal people. So religion did not allow opening human bodies and doctors needed to go around to advance science. The same situation is happing in our discussion where taking tissue samples without consent is justified by benefits to humankind. Doctors and scientists are justified to take and research samples without consent because they work for benefits of the humankind without physically hurting those from whom samples are taken. Moreover, asking for consent may trick people to give up their profit share if their donated tissue may be commercialized and may prevent scientists to get samples, for example, from people whose religious believes prohibit donating tissue or cells that would create a void in knowledge of certain groups of people. If humankind wants science to heal them, they have to let scientists to test their tissue and cells without restrictions.

The possible opposition is that people own their cells. Indeed, people have the right of ownership of their cells like musicians own their songs. In other words, if someone’s cells get into commerce or benefit humankind, the person has to get recognition and financial compensation as an owner of cells.

Throughout the history women were perceived as week, hysterical, small-mined creatures. Even today, in order for women to succeed in male dominated businesses, they need to acquire characteristics ascribed to men such as masculine, rational, less emotional, and strong. As a result, women try to hide their feelings, their emotional states, and fears because they are afraid to be considered weak and feeble.

The stigma put on women as being weak creatures makes women to hide their weaknesses that can be either normal behavior for women or signs of a mental illness. For example, Mary Wood describes in “Life Writing and Schizophrenia” how while her mother was getting sick, her fears based on prejudice against women and Jews turned into her reality. However, instead of asking for help, Wood’s mother was afraid that her children would be taken away from her because of her sickness. In addition, Julia Holland, psychiatrist, in her “Medicating Women’s Feelings” says that women get medications to suppress their natural behavior in favor of men like behavior in order to succeed in the modern society. Based on Wood’s mother experience of being mentally sick and Holland’s account how healthy women are put on medications to suppress their personality, the society makes women to sacrifice their personalities for stereotypes imposed on them.
After being put on medications for schizophrenia, Wood’s mother lived in constant fear of loosing access to medications, becoming homeless, suffering from medications side effects, and loosing herself in probable spike of schizophrenia. A good example of how Mary Wood’s mother lost her personality is the story Wood tells about how she told her mother about amazing authors she discovered and her mother told that she read all those authors. Because of schizophrenia, side effects of medications, inattention of doctors who do not try to understand their patient, health system that does not guarantee people with mental illnesses lifelong medications they need, constant income, people with mental illnesses as Wood’s mother lose their personality to their illnesses.

However, in the American society with large income gaps between people, many people with mental illnesses do not have access to medical care and medications they need. According to Siobhan Brook account, her mother never had access to medications she needed. Moreover, in “Black Feminism in Everyday Life” Brook does not mention or may not ever know about her mother’s personality before she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. For Brook schizophrenia is not central piece of her mother’s personality. Instead Brook concentrates on how being raised by black, poor mother makes her life experience different from experience of white women.

Wood and Forney raise the problem of the price on medications for metal illnesses. High prices on medications for mental illnesses mean that many people cannot afford medications they need or to go to a doctor. Forney says that she pays two hundred dollar for a visit to her psychiatrist. So people like Brook’s mother cannot afford to go to a doctor. As a result, they lose their personalities and lives to mental illnesses. But even with access to medications and doctors, women lose parts of their self to medications since doctors do not care about personalities because they are concerned only about suppressing abnormal chemistry in patients’ brains. Forney, for example, manages her live with bipolar II disorder and continue to be an artist. Linda Logan also with bipolar II disorder with the support of her family managed to live relatively normal live while never being able to return to her passion, teaching. Wood’s mother with schizophrenia with the help of medications was prevented from slipping into her own reality. However, she could not function normally, could not read, could not work, and could not be a woman she used to be. Mental illnesses take away some parts or the whole of women’s self. And not only an illness takes away something, medications and absence of knowledge of how to help women with mental illnesses sometimes takes as much of self as illness.

Anyone with abnormal pain has to face problems such as to make doctors and other people to believe you, to get diagnosis, learning how to cope and live with the pain.

Last summer my friend who is also physics major got sick. Her doctor messed up dosages of her anti-anxiety medications and fried her brain. Then in October under pressure of physics classes, she broke and dropped all classes. I never had doubt that she was in pain, but I never knew the extent of her pain. However, when I got very sick last December and later in March was diagnosed with lupus, I have learned how my friend must have felt. Extent of pain was beyond of anything that any healthy person can imagine.

To make others to believe you and to get right diagnosis is really hard. Like Lena Dunham, like Meghan O’Rourke I had a problem convincing my doctors that I did not imagine my symptoms while they insisted on that my analysis and therefore I was fine. However, thankfully to my mom who believed me, in the end I got my diagnosis. And finally pain became the certainty. However, having diagnosis does not make pain to go away. A diagnosis is a word you use to make people to believe you. But a diagnosis does not make people to understand you.

Convincing or even telling others that you are in pain is a challenge. The spoon theory by Christine Miserandino that describes how people with limited amount of energy and chronic pain have to plan their days is the beautiful way to explain the situation. However, the explanation is not enough since many people still will not believe you because they never felt pain anywhere close to the pain people with chronic pain feel every day. Usually, if you do not look sick, people do not believe you since they may think you are just making up the story to get some attention or not to do some work. In our society a wheel chair, or blindness, or other signs of being crippled are needed to prove that you may not feel well. But signs of being not normal do not give you anything since healthy people realize that their bodies may become crippled too and they diverge their eyes and minds, to hide from a possibility of not being healthy all the time.

Audre Lourde was told to wear prostheses when she came to her doctor’s office because prostheses was important to keep moral in the office full of women already with or with a possibility of having breast cancer. Prosthesis was the sign of being normal, whole, and healthy. So wearing prosthesis, distrusting people with pain, hiding people with disabilities from public life, people try to make society look eternally healthy because the possibility of facing their own mortality, the possibility of being chronically sick or in pain frightens people. So people use ignorance to hide from the truth and distrust anyone who would make them to face fragility of their bodies.

Lynne Greenberg in her “The Body Broken” illustratively shows how hard is to get or never to get right diagnosis, that doctors are not gods and some are quite ignorant, that pain destroys lives. However, in spite of trying to show what kind of hell people with chronic pain go through, Greenberger actually shows how much American society is divided based on wealth and how privileges give access to better health care. The book can be summarized by one quote: “We are polite, even generous overseers of the madness, but always above the fray… We sit midway up our stoop, just high enough to make it difficult to reach us. In control, we casually toss candy from above into the up-stretched candy bags”(“The Broken Body,” page 5). Lynne Greenberg is in control. She is a part of the privileged part of the American society. She can be pitted as someone who forced to live with intolerable chronic pain. However, in contrast to Greenberg millions of people do not have money, access and privileges to get medical attention as good as she does and do not have income to support their families. Apparently, in order acknowledge people with chronic pain, our society needs to listen to a wealthy woman with three non-functional bathrooms in her house on Garden Place, with angel looking children, and with her beautiful lingerie that turned gray in a laundry of the best pain management clinic in the United Stated.

Couple years ago a salesman in Staples convinced me to donate money for breast cancer research by buying a pen that cost only a dollar. He sold me a vulgar bright pink pen to support breast cancer. The pen turned out to be a fine writing instrument. However, every time writing with the pen, I had a nasty feeling of being tricked and robbed. How could a pen that usually sold in a pack of five pens for about seven to ten dollars be sold for a dollar? Math says such pen is usually cost about two dollars. And I got such a pen for a dollar and presumably donated a dollar for a breast cancer research. Numbers did not add up. After the incident with the pen I started noticing pink ribbons on products all around me and avoided buying them. I simply did not like pink color used in context of a disease and did not like feeling tricked and robbed.

Why pink? Pink by definition does not mean a woman or feminine. Pink is just a color that reflects all light wavelengths except wavelengths that correspond to pink color. But somehow from a definition from a physics textbook pink color turned into a social custom to define women. So breast cancer was labeled as women’s disease by a pink ribbon, ignoring the fact that men also can have (not as often) breast cancer. However, breast cancer awareness makes men invisible in the eyes of the society as victims of breast cancer. And not only pink ribbon ignores men who can have breast cancer, pink ribbon also lefts out men who support, love, and fight by the side of women and men who have breast cancer. Moreover, pink color alienates healthy men from taking breast cancer seriously because American culture makes an emphasis on that “real” men do not wear pink color.
So what are we left with? We are left with the fact that cancer survivors, for the sake of healthy people, need to rise up in order to teach the society about breast cancer, need to rise up against companies that have carcinogens in their products and still label their products with pink ribbons as safe products. After reading “Breast Cancer: Power Vs. Prosthesis” by Audre Lorder, the desire to fight against women’s image, set by the society where breasts define you as a woman, overwhelms you. But more horrific is that we need a call from a cancer survivor to think about life adjustments of people who have cancer. We are part of a world where people who have cancer need to fight for their rights instead of being helped and cared for. Healthy people are tricked into believing that everything they need to know about breast cancer is that they need to buy a product with a pink ribbon and that only women can have breast cancer.

From Leisha Davison-Yasol article “Please Put That Pink Can of Soup Down and Put Your Bra Back On” and Lochlann conclusion of examination BMW’s breast cancer awareness day, pink ribbons products would not help women with breast cancer and only result in profit increase for companies. What can we expect from the society that is fine that their government has banned only couple chemicals from beauty products while Europe banned hundreds of chemicals? How can we expect government and society to care about sex therapies for cancer patients discussed in “Let’s talk about sex … and cancer” by Jacque Wilson when sex is a banned topic in the American society while the whole culture is sexualized? When United States has the highest teen pregnancy among developed countries, when some states are not requite to teach students about reproduction or when states decide to teach sex education, it does not need to be scientifically correct, sexual life of people who are already invisible in the eyes of society is not existent.

Ignoring horrors, pain, death, men having breast cancer, men supporting and loving women with breast cancer, a bright pink ribbon defines breast cancer as only women’s problem that can be solved by buying a pen.