The following is an edited excerpt.
In today’s New York Times, Skloot commentson a recently published paper (PDF) detailing the complete genomic DNA sequence of a strain of commonly used HeLa cells (left).
The work was from the Heidelberg site of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and was conducted 1) without approval of an institutional human research review board and 2) without correspondence with the surviving children of Henrietta Lacks.
Read the full post here: The Henrietta Lacks Genome: Consent, Trust, and Common Decency