"Henrietta Lacks and the Ethics of Privacy"
Karla Holloway
Tuesday September 25, 2012
5pm-6:30pm
Clary Theater, Student Success Center
The Henrietta Lacks story reveals some deeply problematic issues regarding medical ethics. But the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has its own problems with regards to privacy and ethics. How does the book repeat the ethical abuses it documents? Why have we missed the privacy issues attached to race, gender, and privilege that the narrative itself engages? Is there a history here?
Karla FC Holloway is James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University, where
she also holds appointments in the Law School, Women’s Studies, and African &
African American Studies, and is an affiliated faculty with the Institute on Care
at the End of Life and the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of
Medicine. Her research and teaching interests focus on African American cultural
studies, biocultural studies, gender, ethics and law. She is the author of many books,
including BookMarks: Reading in Black and White; Passed On: African American Mourning
Stories: A Memorial; Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character;
and, most recently, Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics.
