I'm a bit conflicted on the HeLa cell line scandal. The biopsy was medical treatment she sought, unlike the fraud of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. As medical waste which proved useful, I'm not sure how it using them is morally distinct from dumpster diving. I haven't looked into how they were used, but I wouldn't be surprised if some tests were unethical. There are also some strange legal complications around patents and DNA that don't pass my sniff test. Corporate profits are often more a matter of political plunder than market mutual benefit. [/incoherent 2:25 AM rambling insomniac reply]
Medical malfeasance has been a problem forever. The military performed numerous experiments on troops and there have been countless experiments conducted on people in institutions, against their will. As long as we have medicine as a for profit endeavor there will always be the problems of greed trumping humanity. It's not profitable to cure people.
I fundamentally disagree here. Profit is not fundamentally corrupting. Make the same argument regarding agriculture and feeding people, or mechanics and repairing machinery. In the market, profit is a signal that people have needs and wants to fill. It isn't exploitation to make a mutually-beneficial exchange, and where there is demand far in excess of supply, profits signal market actors to reallocate resources to meet that demand.
There is a widespread assumption that removing the market incentives of profit also removes corruption, but the basic economics of price controls guarantee shortages and suffering. In addition, public choice ec0nomics describes how the incentives of political power 8nterfere with the once tives of satisfying wants. No one likes the DMV. Why would anyone want medicine to work like that?
However, it is entirely valid to criticize the model of corporate cartels protected from competition by bureaucratic interference in the market. The system we have today is called "free market," but that is mislabeling one of the most heavily-controlled sectors of the economy today.