Teaching informed consent as an abstract legal or ethical concept tends to produce flat student writing, because there is nothing concrete for students to argue about beyond restating a definition. The Henrietta Lacks case solves that problem by giving students a real scenario with genuine ambiguity: doctors in 1951 operated within the medical norms of their time while also acting in ways that would clearly violate consent standards today. Building an argumentative essay unit around this tension pushes students past simple moral verdicts and into the harder work of reasoning about how standards change and what that means for judging past actions. A well designed prompt bank makes this easier to assign consistently across different class levels.

One strong prompt asks students to argue whether Johns Hopkins acted unethically by the standards of 1951, then separately whether the hospital's later use and commercialization of HeLa cells across decades should be judged by 1951 standards or by evolving standards over time. Splitting the question this way forces students to grapple with the fact that ethical judgment is not static, since an action that was defensible under one set of norms can become harder to defend as those norms shift and as new information about consequences emerges. Students who only address one half of this split question tend to produce thinner arguments than those who wrestle with both halves and explain how they relate.

A second useful prompt shifts the focus forward in time and asks students to design what informed consent should look like today for tissue samples taken during a routine medical procedure, using the Lacks case as a cautionary example of what happens when consent is treated as an afterthought. This prompt works well for students who struggle with purely historical analysis, since it gives them room to apply what they learned from the book to a forward looking policy question rather than staying locked in historical judgment. It also connects naturally to current debates about genetic data ownership that students may have some awareness of from outside the classroom.

Scaffolding the Argument Before Students Write

Because these prompts ask students to hold two time periods in mind simultaneously, a graphic organizer that separates "what happened" from "how it would be judged today" from "what should change going forward" helps students organize their thinking before drafting. Skipping this step tends to produce essays that slide between time periods without signaling the shift clearly to the reader, which makes the argument hard to follow even when the underlying thinking is sound. Ten minutes spent filling out this organizer as a warm up activity before drafting begins noticeably improves the clarity of the essays that follow, based on what many teachers report after building it into their unit.

• Give students a specific decision point in the book to anchor their argument around
• Require at least one direct quotation from the family's perspective, not just the science
• Ask students to state explicitly which time period's standards they are judging by
• Push for a counterargument paragraph that takes the opposing ethical position seriously
• Score clarity of the timeline separately from the strength of the ethical reasoning

Grading for Counterargument Quality

The strongest essays on this topic take the opposing position seriously rather than setting up a strawman to knock down, and a rubric should reward that explicitly rather than treating counterargument as a box to check. A student arguing that the hospital acted wrongly should be able to articulate the strongest version of why some researchers at the time believed discarded tissue did not require separate consent, before explaining why that reasoning still falls short given what we know about the family's decades of confusion and financial hardship. Essays that skip this step and only present one side tend to feel one dimensional even when individual sentences are well written.

Teachers grading a large stack of these essays can speed up counterargument evaluation by looking for a specific structural marker, such as a paragraph that opens with language signaling an opposing view before pivoting to a response, which makes counterargument quality easier to spot quickly during a fast read. Essays that weave counterargument throughout rather than isolating it in one paragraph are often even stronger, but they take longer to evaluate fairly, so building in enough time per essay for that closer read matters when this criterion carries significant weight in the final grade.

Differentiating the Prompt Across Grade Levels

The same core Henrietta Lacks case can support very different levels of complexity depending on the grade level and course, from a middle school introduction to ethical reasoning through a graduate level bioethics seminar, and the prompt language needs to shift accordingly rather than using one prompt for every level. Younger students benefit from more scaffolding and a narrower question, such as simply whether the doctors should have asked permission, while older students can handle the fuller complexity of judging across shifting historical standards and weighing competing ethical frameworks against each other. Matching prompt complexity to grade level keeps the assignment accessible without watering down the ethical substance that makes the case worth teaching in the first place.

Teachers moving between grade levels or coordinating a vertically aligned curriculum can use the same book and the same core case while adjusting only the prompt's scope and the rubric's expected sophistication, which keeps preparation efficient across multiple courses. This approach also lets departments build a shared understanding of how student reasoning about consent and ethics should develop over several years of instruction, using one consistent text as the throughline rather than switching case studies at every grade level.