What if profits derived from patient sample development funded health care?

[Duer 157099]

I'm reading the book about the woman from whom the HeLa cell line was derived.

I have personally been involved in starting cell lines from patient-derived tissues, so I have some degree of experience from one perspective.

OTOH, I'm also a patient and it would be naive for me to think that my own samples have not found their way into a research lab or freezer at one time or another.

I realize that there are enormous financial rewards that sometimes accompany the research, and the patents, and the controversy and the lawsuits.

I don't know what the best solution is, but I do understand the value to the scientific community of the research tools derived from patient samples.

So I'm thinking:

What about some sort of system where the financial rewards that are derived from such samples are put into a pool that is used to fund universal health care? I think, for example, that the family of Henrietta Lacks (HeLa mom) would have been more understanding about the legacy of their mother's tissue samples if they had been receiving free and comprehensive health care that was partly (or wholly, as the case may be) funded by profits that instead have gone largely to the pharmaceutical companies (who, granted, spent large sums of money to conduct the research in the first place).

Or even a compromise so that there is still some financial incentive to do the research, but the rewards are partially used for the health care fund.

Think about how "socialist" the concept of research is: tissue samples are obtained from the population at large in order to benefit the population at large in the form of disease diagnosis and treatment. I mean, you don't really get any more socialistic than that at a very basic level, and yet I bet the rightwingnuts approve of it. But yet, the corporations reap the rewards once again. Socialized risk, capitalized reward. Why not break into this arena and socialize the reward?

Let's discuss. Plus, would like to discuss the whole matter of patient-derived tissue and what is done with it.

[Duer 157099]

1. The more I'm reading about the HeLa story, the more my imagination is fired

Aside from the policy issues I bring up in the OP, just think about the sci-fi nature of this story!

Until today I had never known about how invasive this cell line was during the 60s/70s. I learned cell culture technique in the 1980s and perhaps by then, it was recognized that cross-contamination was a real issue and that protocols needed to ensure that it didn't happen. I can't imagine, using the techniques that I learned, that cross-contamination could even occur, so it's a mystery to me how it happened on such a widespread scale, that a "discovery" by the Soviets in the 70s was shown to be a result of cross contamination of their cell lines by HeLa cells! It seems that virtually every lab in the world that was doing cell culture in the 1970s had huge numbers of cell lines that they thought were one thing but were actually HeLa cells, because of how aggressive HeLa cells are, they take over every culture that they manage to get into.

So consider the organism that created this unrestricted growth (HPV-18, human papilloma virus 18).

At any other point in history, that greedy aggressive little bugger would've quickly killed off it's host and then vanished with the body.

But instead--because Henrietta Lacks' tumor cells were collected and cultured--that HPV-18 virus has succeeded beyond it's wildest Darwinian dreams! It is now EVERYWHERE, in numbers probably unachieved by any other organism/genome on the planet! Hopefully most of it is safely tucked away in liquid nitrogen freezers worldwide, but still, it's viable and can be resurrected at any time.

Just let that sink it for awhile. The magnitude of success by an organism that rather should have quickly died because of how quickly it kills it's host. But, one scientist intervened and essentially let the genie out of the bottle.

I just find this fascinating.

Also, apparently at one point there was controversy surrounding the issue of whether HeLa cells truly are human anymore, because of the number of transformations that they've undergone throughout the years. Some even suggested that a new genus should be described, based on the HeLa genome.

Mind blowing.