Summary Of The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

The article The End of the Henrietta Lacks Sage? From the Smithsonian magazine was written by Rachel Nuwer in 2013. The Smithsonian is a magazine that provides an outlook on the major topics in history, science art, popular culture and innovation all in one. This certain article dealing with science is well written. Authors should use critical thinking when writing magazine articles, but some do not.

Introduction The topic of this paper will be the book “ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”. This paper will talk about five main points of the book that I thought were the biggest and most important parts of the book. Growing up As Henrietta was growing up, she lived with her grandfather and other cousins.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is at once a biography, a work of science journalism, and a book about the interconnected topics of ethics, justice, and racism. Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who died from cervical cancer in 1951, was the source of the so-called HeLa cell line, which is “omnipresent” (Skloot, 2010, p. 24) in modern science. The HeLa cell line was derived from Henrietta Lacks’ cancerous tumor, which, against the wishes of Henrietta’s family was taken from her corpse and has been used for prolific and lucrative medical research for over seven decades (Skloot, 2010). Skloot (2010) described The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks as “a biography of both the cells and the woman they came from—someone’s daughter, wife, and mother” (pp. 25-26). While the HeLa cells are ubiquitous in research, the woman from whom they came is, at best, a footnote in biological or medical textbooks.

Henrietta was a victim of the unethical methods that took place at John Hopkins hospital. She was violated when they decided to take her cells without her permission, and she was never told that they had taken her cells before she passed away. After, Henrietta passed away her family suffered greatly. Her husband, Day, did not take care of the children well. Henrietta was the only one in the family who visited Elsie, who was at Crownsville State Hospital, which was an hour and a half south of Baltimore (Skloot 45).

Justine Rodriguez Robin Casady English 102: 010 September 19 2017 Acceptance Acceptance plays a huge role in today's world, it is being able to finally acquire information that you can’t fight or change. Throughout the book of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks acceptance is shown any many ways such as, Henrietta Lacks accepting that she has cancer, Henrietta accepts that she needs help with Elsie and sends her to the negro insane, and the Lacks family accepts that they won't ever get a dime for Henrietta's cells. First, Henrietta being able to accepting that she has cancer and along with her finally giving in and telling her family. After her visit to Hopkins, Henrietta went back to her usual routine, cleaning and cooking for her husband, their children, and feeding all of the many cousins each day.

The primary ethical issue is that doctors took Henrietta Lacks’ cells without permission. Doctor Gey forgot the patient and focused his attention on the research.  Doctor Gey’s self- interest and quest for recognition allowed him to cross ethical boundaries.   He took advantage of Henrietta Lacks when she was sick, vulnerable and in need of medical attention therefore, one must question his moral judgment.

Doctors have been helping heal the sick since the begin of time, why where there not laws in place until 1974. Henrietta did not have the option, back in the 1951 when she first visited the hospital. In those days’ people were very uneducated especially colored people do to segregation, the majority believed and did whatever the doctors said. Henrietta race was very important at this time in history she was a colored woman. She was only treated in colored exam and procedure room in the hospital.

Henrietta even admitted, “she, like most black patients, only went to Hopkins when she thought she had no choice,” (Skloot: 16). Henrietta felt forced to go to this certain hospital, where she was met with doctors who had no intention of explaining to her what exactly was happening to her body. Not only was she disrespected because of her financial state, her family was too. Even though their mother is the reason for the world’s largest medical revolution, strangers were given the profits that came off of Henrietta’s cells. Yet Henrietta’s children suffered so significantly, they could not even afford health insurance; for the family of the woman who created a whole new look on the medical field to

During the 1960’s when Henrietta found out she had cancer there was still segregation in America and that meant African Americans were not treated with equality. Certain things that were done to them were not considered legally right, but were deemed medically appropriate. For example the Tuskegee syphilis study which occurred in the 1930’s; “They recruited hundreds of African-American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful and preventable deaths, even after penicillin could cure them. ”(Skloot, 2010, p. 50). Also there was the Mississippi Appendectomies; “…unnecessary hysterectomies performed on poor black women to stop them from reproducing, to give young doctors a chance to practice the procedure.

There is a large controversy over ethics and the part that it plays in medicine. Where is the line between advancement and patient rights? The issue of tissue ownership and information ownerships is only one of the many problems that Henrietta and her family are stuck dealing with. But, before Rebekkah Skloot introduces the readers to Henrietta and her cells, Skloot opens with an epigraph from Elie Wiesel. By using Wiesel’s epigraph Skloot creates the tone for the rest of the novel.

Doctors, one side of the coin they are viewed as the ones that can cure the sick with their knowledge, the ones that are supposed to help them get better. The other side they are feared and are avoided at all cost by some. Doctors have this bad reputation about them because sometimes they don’t even tell their patients what is wrong with them. Or the patients themselves don’t even question the doctors because they went to school and have a prestigious piece of paper. In “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot, she describes benevolent deception, which doctors had no trouble of doing in the mid-century, as the doctors keeping their patients in the dark.

In 1951 Henrietta omplained of a “knot in her uterus” and went to John Hopkins Hospital, a charity hospital for the poor and black, to get it checked out. Her doctor diagnosed the hard lump as cervical cancer and started radiation treatments immediately. Because of the cancer Henrietta couldn’t take care of Elsie, her oldest female child that epilepsy with her other four children. So Henrietta sent Elsie to the Crownsville State Hospital or, hospital for the negro insane until she died a little while after her mother at the age of 15. During one of her surgery’s, her doctor secretly took a slice of her tumor and gave it to Dr. George Gey, a scientist who was trying to find an “immortal cell”. Not only did Gey find what he was looking for, he found cells that grew at an abnormal rate.

To extend this, there were even fewer hospitals for the poor in which case Henrietta was. John Hopkins hospital was the only one in the area that treated black patients and had a free ward. Skloot (2011) wrote “David drove Henrietta

022300 Courtney Davis Mrs. Allinder IB Literature 10 October 2016 Emotional Ties Created In The Reader Thesis: In the creative non-fiction book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot, creates emotional ties to the reader through the character, Deborah. Topic Sentence: Deborah was spoken about by Skloot before Deborah appeared as a live character with dialogue to form a founding idea about Deborah in the reader. Evidence: When Skloot had finally received Deborah’s number from Pattillo, Pattillo gave Skloot a list of what to do and what not to do when “dealing with” Deborah. He told her not to be aggressive or “clinical”, not to force Deborah to do anything, and definitely “don’t talk down” to her because “she hates that”.

An essential part of modern society relied on trust, especially the trust of doctors and scientists. People had the right to make an informed decision about their bodies and body parts. People had a right to their body parts, both attached and cell samples collected by doctors. The actions that the medical professions made will continue to affect future generations in both positive and negative ways. In the contemporary biographical novel, the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot used logical opinions to argue about the importance of consent to reveal the lack of morality from those in the medical field which continues to persist today.