An Analysis Of Rappoport

Can you imagine going to the doctor and doing whatever that doctor told you was the best for you without asking questions? Well that is what patients did in the 1950s, especially African Americans, who were still being victims of racial prejudice and segregation. In this book, the author, Rebecca Skloot tells us about Henrietta Lacks, a 31 year old African American woman who was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and trusted her doctors, who took a sample of her cells without her knowledge. These cells would help in scientific discoveries that helped millions of people. Henrietta died of cancer and her family is devastated when they find out that the cells had been taken without permission, and that they were being sold for profit.

Rebecca Skloot’s, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” brings forth the story of a black woman, Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta was one of ten kids raised on a tobacco farm by her grandfather, Tommy Lacks, and married her half-brother David ‘Day’ Lacks. Before Henrietta died in 1951, doctors diagnosed her with cervical cancer and a malignant tumor at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the only hospital in the Baltimore area that accepted black patients. This story focused on how doctors at Johns Hopkins, particularly George Gey, the head of tissue-culture research at Johns Hopkins, took advantage of Henrietta. Before her death, doctors biopsied a portion of her cervical tumor and harvested the cancerous tissues. When researcher cultured these tissues, they discovered the cells had hearty, unusual qualities that allowed them to grow almost anywhere, with relative ease that was unheard of in the early stages of the field of cell production. Once researchers realized these qualities, people took steps to ensure her cells, called HeLa by researchers, could be purchased by anyone around the world. After her death, these cells were the backbone of many scientific discoveries around the world such as the vaccine for polio and the realization of HPV. However, Skloot questions whether or not these doctors ever had the right to take these cells from Henrietta without her permission, let alone sell them to researchers around the world. Rebecca Skloot analyzed the story of Henrietta’s HeLa cells,

In the book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, the author Rebecca Skloot introduces the reader to a painful story of Lack’s family. The main character of the book, Henrietta Lack, had survived the interplay of poverty, race and science, as well as one of the significant medical discoveries of the century. In her book, the author narrates the lucid science tackling the issue of spookiness of the cells from spiritual perspective that the family was associated with while acknowledging that their mother was immortal. In fact, the author analyses compressively the various aspects of Henrietta Lack’s life and the HeLa cells which have made her life endless. "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" dwells upon an uncanny thing in the cancer cells of the cervix of Henrietta Lack.

As a preface to the first chapter of Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, author Rebecca Skloot introduces readers to a quotation from Elie Wiesel’s The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.” This establishes a firm basis on how Skloot provides an analysis regarding the treatment of cervical cancer patient Henrietta Lacks. Furthermore, it contrasts with the views of the scientific community and media outlets—who in many degrees have presented Henrietta as an abstraction of sorts. These perspectives result in harsh consequences that limit the power of the scientific community well into the future.

At the very end of the book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks “ written by Rebecca Skloot turned the Henrietta’s story about how religious beliefs and spiritual changes the Lacks family views and get over their mother’s death. The question is; how did the Lacks family’s understanding about religion and spirituality to not be worried about Henrietta’s deaths and become optimistic? The first thing is the struggle to get over and release the burden about Henrietta’s death.The persuasion of Gary’s preaching and religion belief affect to Deborah, and the honor revolution for her mom. Lastly, the spirituality is about the message of God by sending Henrietta orders to fulfill the very important mission that God can’t do is saving our people’s lives, so he recalled Henrietta as an angel to make his wish came true.

I was touched by the reactions of the family to when they defined the term immortality and related it solely to their family. Skloot stated, “It was the closest they’d come to seeing their mother alive since they were babies.” (Skloot, 265). Deborah and her family believed that the immortal cells represented her mother. After grasping the comparison on what her family versus how scientists felt the cells represented shifted in my reaction. I became resentful and offended of the way the doctors treated Henrietta and her cells like a product. A women died of cervical cancer, and they were using her cells as if they were a common household product. This stood out to me because as an African American, soon to be Biology graduate, it shows how far we’ve come. I concluded that this book is about the discrimminations of a woman who lived in a time where African Americans were not treated equally by scientists and researchers. In the text, you could feel the vulnerability that the family felt; and to read how they were treated was depressing.

A conflict between “scientific progress” and individual ownership the body, “whether you own or have the right to control your tissues” is an abstract debate key to Henrietta’s history (Skloot 316-317). These intangible ethical issues that Skloot discusses are interrelated with the story of HeLa- racism, exploitation, and the moral as well as legal dilemmas of tissue ownership. While HeLa cells themselves may be tangible, aspects of their story are clearly abstract. Rebecca Skloot explores both concrete and conceptual aspects by telling the narratives of both the “‘birth of HeLa, and the death of Mrs. Lacks,’” (Skloot 224). These stories illuminate each other; the reader sees both scientific and the social subjects in a new perspective as components of a single narrative. An alternate title for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks could be HeLa and Henrietta’s Eternal Legacy, as this illustrates the integral juxtaposition of the story- the narrative of science and discovery that surround the physical cells Henrietta left behind, as well as tale of the social and ethical conflicts that comprise Mrs. Lacks’s

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the book depicts what happened when doctors decided to benefit the majority and take advantage of the minority. Henrietta Lacks, an African-American patient at a renowned hospital, went to receive care and during her stay, she was found to have cells that could cure major diseases. The doctors at the hospital became more interested in her cells than her treatment, leading to her untimely death while others benefited, all while not even compensating Lacks or her family (Skloot 280). It is amazing to see the utter lack of regard towards Lacks and her family.

People easily view themselves as the main character of their story. We experience our lives from the first person perspective, our own perspective. We are the center of every single one of our experiences. But what about everyone else? After all, we cannot be the main characters of every life story. We think very little if at all about what sort of life the barista serving us coffee has, or the daily woes that plague a fast food worker serving us burgers at a drive-through. We have a tendency to view others as functions of how they benefit us. Rebecca Skloot’s nonfiction novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a vivid illustration of this spirit of abstraction. The scientific community and the national media used Henrietta and her family as a commodity, exploiting them for their own benefit, forgetting that behind the cancer cells they took, lies a human being. This abuse was caused by an irresponsible sense of altruistic authority, journalistic encroachment and the phenomenon of groupthink.

This idea was blatantly ignored with the treatment of Henrietta and many others. Henrietta was a living, breathing, human being, that deserved equivalent treatment. She was instead, dehumanized into cells, her privacy invaded, and her family permanently damaged from the experience. Henrietta was not immortal. In reality, “Henrietta died at 12:15 a.m. on October 4, 1951” (86). From the unethical treatment she received to the blatant disregard for empathy with regard to her deathly illness, Henrietta was maltreated. John Moore’s case exposes the widespread nature of this problem. “It was very dehumanizing to be thought of as Mo,” claims Moore (201). “...I was Mo, I was the cell line, like a piece of meat” (201). John Moore endured the same as Henrietta. Both viewed as abstractions, their truths ignored. They both, however, hold a triumph. They contributed to the betterment of society, and helped to advance medical practices and cured countless

By beginning this essay I will talk about a topic inspired by Henrietta Lacks and why her cells were such a big discussion, scientifically and emotionally. It is widely known in science that when we age, our cells die off and create new cells. If we change over time and our cells from five years ago or even two months ago, change too, why the Lacks family was upset the Henrietta’s cells were taken. While her cells became a break through to science, the family still felt there was some wrong doing in the making. People want to have the freedom to decide what is taken from them with permission. It gives us a sense of ethics to what we believe is right or wrong, what is ours to keep and give. I will be writing about the science of our cells and

The immortal life of Henrietta is a book in which Skloot, the author talks about the perspectives of the medical history in a black woman with cancer, which provided studies that have helped millions of people with diseases by providing studies and medications for their illnesses. The author seems to mainly focus on raising moral issues that occurred during that time. It is a time in the 1950s when a woman named Henrietta Lacks, gets “treatment” at Johns Hopkins Hospital the only known hospital that would provide treatment and care for African American patients. Henrietta went in search of a treatment for her aggressive form of cervical cancer. To begin, a moral issue arose while she was on the operating table Dr. Gey took a sample of her cancerous cervical tissue without Henrietta’s consent or knowledge. Dr. Gey was a doctor who did studies particularly for cancer in an attempt to create an immortal line of human cells that would eventually lead to a cure for cancer. Less than a year after Henrietta’s diagnosis, Henrietta passed away at age thirty-one. Henrietta’s cells were the first to ever be lab tested and were still growing strongly. Her family in fact, had no idea that a part of her was still alive at John Hopkins Hospital and eventually in hospitals all over. Henrietta’s son in an interview even mentioned that because their mother was Blacks she was not recognized by people. He said it was practically impossible for a

Alfred is still in prison, Christoph Lengauer is now Global Head of Oncology Drug Discovery at sanofi-aventis, John Moore appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and then died in 2001, and many more. Skloot finishes the book with the Afterword which includes the consent and money aspect of the novel. “When I tell people the story of Henrietta Lacks and her cells, their first question is usually Wasn’t it illegal for doctors to take Henrietta’s cells without her knowledge? Don’t doctors have to tell you when they use your cels in research? The answer is no--”

In “Bacteria on the Brain” By Emily Eakin, she writes about the ethics surrounding a doctor who attempts to save the lives of patients with brain tumors by using his own alternative methods. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the author writes about Victor and his creature’s attempts to expand science, and answer moral questions concerning life and death. Regarding the substance of the article, Neurosurgeon Dr. Paul Muizelaar and his controversial treatment of three patients suffering from terminal brain cancer engenders serious ethical debate. On one hand, Muizelaar epitomizes a man of brilliance and ingenuity, driven by the desire to correct his patients’ otherwise hopeless situations. On the other hand, a man filled with hubris who discounted the risks in his pursuit of success. Given the evidence present in the text of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley would contend that Muizelaar’s actions were innovative and driven by his desire to save the lives of his patients.

In conclusion, Person introduces two conflicting opinions of the main message, medical ethics. However, there is a bias towards Jenna’s initial view, and the opinions of Lily and Alleys. Overall, the author uses this book as a way of showing us the ever-more relevant debate of medical ethics, but wants us to make our own decision of what view to