Public Health Is The Wellbeing Of The General Public

Public health is the wellbeing of the general public. Public health is everything from health promotion to injury and disease prevention for the betterment of the entire population not just the select few. The government at federal, state, and local levels generally monitors public health and set rules and regulations. They have to regulate research to ensure that it is ethical and legal because over the last hundred years many unethical experiments and trails have been done on at risk populations such as the Tuskegee Syphilis study. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Henrietta is a poor African American woman raised on a tobacco farm in the south. She died of malignant cervical cancer that gave rise to one of the most famous cell†¦show more content†¦Henrietta had a biopsy done of her cervical cancer when she went to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the few facilities that would treat African Americans at that time. The doctor, Dr. TeLinde, took two samples, one can cerous and one normal to compare the two. His colleague Dr. Gey was a recognized tissue culture researcher who asked for samples of cervical cancer to study, one of the samples randomly given was Henrietta’s. She was treated for her cancer but it wasn’t enough, and the cancer eventually spread through her body and she died. Her cells, that Dr. Gey was given, showed the amazing ability to regenerate her telomeres, sequences of repeating DNA that are shortened each time a cell divides acting as a biological clock. Her cells appeared to be immortal and were easily grown again and again in laboratory conditions in vitro. He gave some of these cells to many other researchers because he saw their usefulness in their respective fields. Anything from how viruses replicate to what a drug does to them would benefit from HeLa cells. Biotech companies made a HeLa (the given name of the cells, Henrietta Lacks) factory to mass produce these cells for profit. They began shipping the cells to anyone that wanted to purchase them: other researchers, drug companies and even cosmetic companies that could test them on human cells versus animals. This was a major advancement for the community and