HeLa

This morning's MHP(Melissa Harris Perry) show on MSNBC was golden. Finally after all these years I got to see Professor Anita Hill speak live and in person again. She is still soft-spoken. She's still assertive. She's still learned. I feel so lucky to have heard her views again , on some very important issues.

I find it significant that she chose the Melissa Harris Perry show, and of course that the MHP show even exists. I count myself so lucky to have seen this in my lifetime. As a feminist, it helps

me envision an intelligent future in which my grandchildren can live.

After listening to the drivel spoken about and made issue of in the Republican presidential

primaries these past several months, I have told myself if I am going to listen to cable news, I

do deserve something dignified and intellectual once in a while.

On that same Sunday morning show, Professor Perry highlighted the famous HeLa cells.

I first learned of these powerful cells in a Harvard Medical School newsletter in the eighties. Before reading about these cells, I thought all cervical cancers were alike, or very similar. After reading about them, I realized some cervical cancers are as deadly and quickly killing as a 'terrible

swift sword'.

Some are benign enough if caught early. But some are like HeLa. From their start to their finish,

they could kill a person dead within six months of suspicious pap onset, even with all the medicines and chemotherapies in the world.

I imagine we've made advances since the eighties; yet since the advent of AIDS, even yeast infections can and do kill women who are HIV positive.

I do think Henrietta Lacks descendants have a right to renumeration if her cells have been used

all these years to further research and to generate monies. This has been going on since 1951, and

has helped eradicate polio. Not all polio vaccines were sold without profit, for instance.

Ms. Lacks was not a cadaver from the free clinic, was not a donation to science, not a lady destined for a Potter's burial. She had a family. Why would medical profiteers not acknowledge

a debt owed her descendants.

When I first read of these cells, my advice to my children was to get regular exams by a gynecologist when they grew up, and to remember their mom didn't believe virgins got cervical

cancer, even though medicine doesn't agree it is an STD.

Of course, medicine rarely called anything an STD unless it caused great physical distress to men.