A lawyer might have told the Lackses they could sue on the grounds of privacy violation or lack of informed consent. But the Lackses didn’t talk to a lawyer—they didn’t even know anyone had done research on their DNA, let alone published it. Deborah was still waiting to hear the results of what she thought was her cancer test, and Sonny and Lawrence were still busy trying to figure out how to get money from Hopkins. They didn’t know that on the other side of the country, a white man named John Moore was about to begin fighting the same battle. Unlike the Lacks family, he knew who’d done what
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