Médecine sciences : M/S
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Fifty years after Henrietta Lacks died of aggressive glandular cervical cancer, the first cell line - HeLa cell line - is the workhorse of laboratories everywhere. It helped to produce drugs for numerous diseases, including poliomyelitis, Parkinson's, leukemias. ⋯ For decades, biologists worked with contaminated cell lines and today, the problem is not yet solved. But the story of HeLa cells is also a moving reflection of racial and ethical issues in medicine in the late half-twentieth century in the USA.
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Médecine sciences : M/S · Feb 2010
Review[Ethical issues raised by 2 kinds of protocols for organ donation after cardiac death: aspects particular to France, Spain and the United States].
France, Spain and US are three leader countries in activity of organ procurement and transplantation. Donation after cardiac death is one of the strategies they have been implemented in order to face organ shortage. ⋯ These protocols give rise to important ethical issues that have been widely discussed in the international literature. The aim of this paper is to identify and discuss the ethical issues that these protocols raise in these three countries.