Medical Care for Henrietta’s Family (Situational Irony)
But I always have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense. (Pg. 24)
As Deborah points out in this quote, it is strange and ironic that none of the Lackses can afford medical treatment or doctor appointments, given all the of the remarkable and life-changing discoveries their mother’s cells have facilitated. To put it frankly, millions of people around the world have had their lives saved because of the medical breakthroughs the HeLa cells made possible, and yet her immediate family members suffer and die from curable ailments.
Distance Traveled (Situational Irony)
He [Gey] sent shipments of HeLa cells to researchers in Texas, India, New York, Amsterdam, and many places between. Those researchers gave them to more researchers, who gave them to more still. Henrietta’s cells rode into the mountains of Chile in the saddlebags of pack mules. (Pg. 94)
Being a poor Black woman in the rural American South, Henrietta did not travel outside of two states, Virginia and Maryland, during her lifetime. Therefore it is ironic that her cells have traveled around the world. In death, Henrietta is more widely traveled than she is in life.
The Tuskegee Trials and the Polio Vaccine (Situational Irony)
Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus—and at the very same time—that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. (Pg. 152)
The Tuskegee syphilis study was a clinical study conducted from 1932 to 1972 that observed the progression of untreated syphilis in rural Black men in Alabama. During the study, none of the test subjects were treated for the disease nor were they informed that treatment for the disease existed. The researchers running the study also prevented the men from receiving treatment from other sources. The gross humanitarian and moral ills committed during the Tuskegee study remain a topic of discussion in modern times. It is tragically ironic that while these evils were being committed against the Black community in Tuskegee, Alabama, members of that same community were working feverishly to help people using the cells of a Black woman.
Cofield’s Lawsuit (Situational Irony)
The most astonishing detail of Cofield’s suit was his claim that the Lacks family had no right to any information about Henrietta Lacks because she’d been born Loretta Pleasant. (Pg. 353)
The foundation of Cofield’s lawsuit against the Lacks is that they have no right to information about Henrietta Lacks because legally they weren’t related to her, but to Loretta Pleasant, the name Henrietta was born with. It is ironic for Cofield to base his lawsuit on these grounds, when he himself is not related to Henrietta Lacks and therefore by his own logic also has no right to Henrietta’s information.
