Medical Ethics In The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

There have been many conflicts in the past in the medical field about violating patients’ privacy rights. In the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, there is an issue where her cells are taken to check what she went to the hospital for, yet, her cells weren’t only checked for that. Her cells were being transported, sold, and even injected into other people for experiments without any form of consent. The Skid Row Cancer Study and the Henrietta Lacks study are similar in the way that they both have some ethical issues having to do with consent. Around the 1950’s, Dr. Perry Hudson (a medical researcher from Columbia University) wanted to perform some prostate biopsies to see who had prostate cancer in Manhattan on 1,200.

This led to major breakthroughs in the medical world and allowed scientists to experiment effects of toxins and cures. “If the whole profession is doing it, how can you call it 'unprofessional conduct'?" (Skloot, 134) Skloot wrote this book to unveil the injustices that the Lacks family and many other African-Americans went through. The key passage shows that many medical professionals used the “everyone else is doing it” defense to justify their unethical behavior.

About 60 years ago, before African Americans had much respect at all, there was a woman named Henrietta Lacks who was diagnosed with cancer in her cervix. Without asking for permission, Henrietta’s doctors took some of her cells from her cervix, and they took them to do more research on them and tried to grow them for the first time outside of a persons body. Because she was African American, she and the rest of her family were not respected by doctors, or many other people at this time. These cells later became very critical to medical advancements and scientific research for the rest of the world. But, the injustice of this situation raises a large controversy over whether or not this is justified.

While the general terrain covered by Skloot has already been charted (by Washington and other journalists), the signal accomplishment of The Immortal Life is its excavation of hospital and medical records on Henrietta Lacks and its exhaustive interviews with her surviving family members. Skloot braids that compelling stream into a fluid accounting of the nascent history of cell research in America, creating in the end a riveting narrative that is wholly original. In short, we learn the stunning news that in 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a poor, undereducated 31-year-old black woman from a small Virginia outpost, unwittingly “donated” cancerous cells that eventually spawned a molecular cottage industry—and aided hundreds of breakthroughs in scientific

When a researcher from the National Cancer Institute was visiting a friend, Bobbette, who was the wife of one of Henrietta’s oldest son’s. He asked her last name and excitedly asked her if she was related to Henrietta Lacks. He told her about Henrietta Lacks, and Bobbette ran to tell the family that Henrietta was still alive. The researcher or anyone else in the medical field was not supposed to tell or ask anyone including relatives about Henrietta’s medical records.

The Lacks family had reporters and researchers approach them before, but none of them treated them the way Skloot did. Skloot, who learned about HeLa cells in highschool, was interested in the history and background of Henrietta, rather than the scientific facts. Although she was repeatedly rejected by the now cautious and paranoid Lacks family, who, at first, only saw her as a greedy reporter coming to bring even more upheaval into the family’s lives, Skloot was finally able to build a relationship with the family, namely Deborah, and invested into their lives, all the while writing the novel that would finally bring Henrietta’s story to light. Skloot had a different approach than the scientific community and media because she didn’t see Henrietta as an abstraction, but as an “universe with its own secrets,” which she so willingly shared with the

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot was published in 2010 and instantly became a New York Times bestseller. The book is a summary of Henrietta's life, including the medical history and issues with bioethical she faces. The book contains a lot of obvious issues with this topic that the reader can see instantly. Skloot does not come out directly and point them all out, as they were presented to the reader by telling the story with a violation of Henrietta's rights and tying bioethical issues within them. Henrietta Lacks’s life and human rights get violated throughout her lifetime due to bioethical issues, selfishness, and by others injecting her own cells into thousands of people without her knowledge and consent.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Sloot Rebecca Skloot wanted to educate the public, in a positive and negative way, about groundbreaking scientific research. The historic study conducted upon Henrietta Lacks, was any extreme case of a de-humanization experiment conducted by John Hopkins to achieve personal gratification to complete his case work. Ultimately resulting in Henrietta’s death due to Hopkins personal goal of achieving scientific grandeur, her personal death and contribution towards the scientific world ultimately rewarded humanity with an immortal impact upon life’s health discoveries. Although this study may have been extremely impactful towards humanity itself, it goes unnoticed in a major majority of the worlds

Consequently taking away the patients decision and instead giving physicians full control to seemingly “play god”, as the decision is now in their hand. Through this problem within the medical community, society has inadvertently traded off ethics in pursuit for common good (Martinez). Because of this, such practices as benevolent deception in hospitals had room to emerge during the Jim Crow era. As doctors apparently took the decision of the patient in their own hands. Benevolent deception was a widely common practice during the times of Henrietta Lacks.

After all it was back in time where the colored weren’t treated equally, so they never had a chance of getting any money from the HeLa cells. Some members of the Lacks family, who had made peace with Hopkins after learning in the 1970s that it had taken Henrietta’s cells, now planned to sue the Hospital for taking the cells without permission. They accepted it and now they had to live with it, with knowing that their mother's cells were being sold to people around the

The Unintentional Story of Deborah Lacks Negative incidents in one’s past can have an enormous impact on that individual’s future. A person should not linger on the negative, they should try to learn from their past and move forward, and look for positive aspects in life. In Rebecca Skloot’s, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, proves that the memories and struggles that Deborah Lacks endured, impacted the way that she lived her life, and helped with molding her identity. “I used to get so mad about that where it made me sick and I had to take pills. But don’t got it in me no more to fight.

Humans place a specific regard to mourning in which we attempt to identify with each other across cultures, age and race. When interacting with the Lack family, the flippant attitude of scientists pertaining to Henrietta and her cells furthers the implication that Henrietta Lacks was an abstraction to the scientific community. McKusick states, “I suspect there was no effort to explain anything in great detail. They would have just said, ‘... we would like to have that blood from you people’” (Skloot, 2011).

In the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, education plays a substantial role in what occurs throughout the book. Many major events are related to people not understanding what is happening to them. Skloot brings up the topic ’Lack of Education,’ frequently and this affected Henrietta's treatments, and how her family viewed the situation, and how the black community viewed scientist overall. In many occasions lack of education causes a major event to happen, “she didn't write much, and she hadn't studied science in school,”(pg 16) with little education Henrietta had no idea what was wrong with her. Without Henrietta or her family knowing symptoms of certain diseases Henrietta does not go to the hospital till the end.

Bushra Pirzada Professor Swann Engh-302 October 4th 2015 Rhetorical Analysis: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks written by Rebecca Skloot tells the story of a woman named Henrietta Lacks who has her cervical cancer. It further goes to tell the audience how Henrietta altered medicine unknowingly. Henrietta Lacks was initially diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951; however, the doctors at John Hopkins took sample tissues from her cervix without her permission. The sample tissues taken from Henrietta’s cervix were used to conduct scientific research as well as to develop vaccines in the suture.

Racism in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Imagine your mother, sister, wife, or cousin was diagnosed with cervical cancer and you believed the doctors were doing everything in their power to help her. Only later you discovered her cells were used for research without consent and she was not properly informed of the risks of her treatment due to her race. This story happened and is told by Rebecca Skloot in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Skloot use of narrative and her writing style enhances the understanding of the story. Henrietta Lacks was a young black woman who was diagnosed with cervical cancer at John Hopkins Hospital.