Among the many possible essay prompts tied to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, one of the most frequently assigned asks students to argue directly whether individuals should retain ownership or commercial rights over tissue removed from their own bodies during medical procedures. This prompt is popular precisely because it moves beyond historical judgment of the 1951 events and into a genuinely open, contemporary policy question that current law has not fully settled, which gives students a real argumentative stake rather than simply agreeing with an obvious historical verdict. Grading this specific prompt well requires a rubric attentive to its particular structure, since it blends legal, ethical, and practical policy reasoning in ways that a purely historical or purely literary essay prompt does not.

Strong essays on this prompt typically address at least three distinct considerations: the ethical argument for individual ownership rooted in bodily autonomy, the practical argument against strict ownership rights rooted in concerns about slowing beneficial medical research, and some acknowledgment of the current legal landscape, notably that United States law generally does not grant individuals ownership rights over discarded tissue following a 1990 court ruling in a related case. A rubric should check for engagement with all three dimensions rather than allowing students to argue purely from ethical intuition without any awareness of the practical or legal complexity that makes this question genuinely difficult rather than simple. Essays that address only the ethical dimension, however well argued, are incomplete relative to what the prompt is actually asking for.

It is worth noting to students, and checking for in grading, that a fully coherent position on this question needs to address the practical concern seriously: if every patient could refuse or demand payment for research use of their discarded tissue, medical research relying on large tissue banks and biological samples could become significantly more expensive and logistically complicated. A student arguing for strong individual ownership rights needs to grapple with this practical tradeoff rather than ignoring it, proposing some mechanism, such as an opt-out system or standardized compensation, that addresses the practical concern while still respecting the underlying ethical principle they are arguing for. Essays that propose a genuinely workable middle path, rather than an absolute position in either direction, often demonstrate the most sophisticated engagement with this particular question.

Requiring Engagement With the Legal Landscape

Because current law is directly relevant to this question and reasonably well documented, requiring students to reference the actual legal status of tissue ownership, even briefly, grounds the essay in real world context rather than allowing it to remain purely hypothetical or philosophical. A brief note on Moore v. Regents of the University of California, the case that established that patients generally do not retain property rights over cells removed during treatment, gives students a concrete legal anchor to argue for or against, which tends to produce more substantive essays than prompts that leave the legal dimension entirely unaddressed. Teachers should decide in advance how much legal specificity to require based on the course level, since a middle school version of this essay reasonably needs less legal detail than a college level policy essay would.

• Require engagement with ethical, practical, and legal dimensions of the ownership question
• Check whether students address the practical research-cost tradeoff, not just the ethical argument
• Reward proposed middle-path solutions over absolute positions that ignore real tradeoffs
• Require at least a brief, accurate reference to the current legal landscape on tissue rights
• Score whether the student's proposed policy would actually be workable in practice

Handling Factual Errors About the Legal Landscape

Students researching this topic independently sometimes encounter outdated or inaccurate information about tissue ownership law, particularly since the legal landscape around genetic data specifically, as opposed to physical tissue samples, has evolved somewhat since the core precedents were established. Grading should distinguish between a student who makes a reasonable, well sourced claim about the legal landscape that happens to be slightly imprecise and a student who makes a claim with no apparent research or sourcing behind it at all, since the first reflects a genuine but forgivable research limitation while the second reflects a deeper gap in the assignment's basic requirements. Feedback correcting factual errors about the law should be specific and point toward better sourcing rather than simply marking the claim wrong without further explanation.

Teachers who assign this prompt regularly benefit from maintaining a short, updated fact sheet on the current legal landscape that they can share with students before the assignment begins, which reduces the frequency of these factual errors in the first place and makes grading somewhat faster since fewer papers will require this specific kind of legal correction. Keeping this fact sheet current requires periodic review, since new court cases or legislation touching on genetic data and tissue rights continue to emerge, and an outdated fact sheet can actually introduce the same errors it was originally designed to prevent.

Connecting the Essay to Current Events

This prompt connects naturally to ongoing news coverage of genetic testing companies, data breaches involving genetic information, and periodic legislative proposals around genetic privacy, and encouraging students to bring in a current news example alongside the historical Henrietta Lacks case tends to produce more original, less formulaic essays than restricting the discussion purely to historical material. A rubric that offers bonus consideration, or simply a stronger overall impression, for essays that make this kind of contemporary connection well rewards students for treating the assignment as a genuinely current policy question rather than a purely historical exercise disconnected from present day relevance.

Teachers should be prepared for some variation in how current these contemporary examples are, given how quickly news cycles move relative to how far in advance an assignment is typically planned, and should grade the quality of the connection drawn rather than penalizing students for using a slightly less recent example than what might currently be in the news at the exact moment of grading. What matters most is whether the student demonstrates that the Henrietta Lacks case has genuine ongoing relevance to real contemporary policy questions, not whether they happened to select the single most recent possible news story available at the time of writing.