Analysis Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

Guidelines surrounding taking samples of human tissue for research have changed greatly, “…the NIH now has “very stringent guidelines” requiring consent for any tissues collected for their banks.”(Skloot 780). No matter who the person is or what race they are, all people are to be treated the same and must give consent for all samples. This does not mean that all race issues are gone though. This does not mean that doctors are taking samples of human tissues without consent, the issue is in general health care. It is not a secret that because of this, there are more health issues in minority groups, “…blacks and other minority groups in the U.S. experience more illness, worse outcomes, and premature death compared with whites.” (Tello 1). Henrietta would have suffered a great deal less and would have had much better care, but it is possible that she would have encountered some inequalities, even still, it would be nothing compared to what she lived

There were many researchers involved in learning about cells and their basic function. In order to do this, tissue samples were taken from patients to examine. However, in the past there weren’t many laws regarding informed consent and patient confidentiality. In my opinion, the Gold/Moore case is different than what Dr. Gey did with Henrietta Lack’s cells. Gold and Gey had very different incentives. Dr. Gey was a tissue researcher whose aim was to create an immortal line of human cells to be used for medical research. Gey had spent 30 years prior to the discovery of Henrietta’s immortal cells, working to grow malignant cells outside of the human body. His goal was to find the cause and cure of cancer.

They thought the doctors were still trying to fix her,” (Skloot 65). Henrietta’s family is still being treated poorly today, being lied to and never got a profit from the cells. “’She’s the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?’”(Skloot 168). In fact, Henrietta herself is one of the major reasons the debate on whether it should be legal to cell organs and cells is a debate today. “HeLa cells as the springboard to launch the first industrial-scale for-profit cell distribution center,” (Skloot 101). Although there are several arguments in the debate over selling body parts, three key arguments deal with the topics of money, helping others, and personal choice. Considering all of the topics, the selling of body parts for profit should be

Henrietta Lacks is woman, whose cells have been used for 63 years after her death in 1951, and will continue to be used as long as they are continue to grow. Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman who was born in the south, who married her cousin and moved up north. After giving birth to her last child, she finds that she has cancer. The doctors took a sample of her cancer cells without her permission, and now have millions of dollars but the family is still hasn’t received the money they are rightfully entitled to. Many of healthcare and entitlements that are around today, are due to the ill treatment of Henrietta and her family. Still to this day, there is very little known about Henrietta Lacks, even with the book out, and she has

Throughout her book, Rebecca Skloot shared the story of Henrietta Lacks and how her cells became so important to science. This narrative involves racism, injustice, and ambition. Henrietta, for instance, alike the majority of African-Americans, was a poor tobacco worker, who lived in a small town called Clover. Blacks did not have the same benefits as white people. One significant difference was medical care: hospitals separated colored and white people using different floors one for whites and one for blacks. Evidently, the white section had more advantages; instead, some blacks could not even afford seeing a doctor and when they did, “it was understood that black people did not question white people’s

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is an amazingly captivating book about an African American woman who died in 1951 of cervical cancer, whose cells became the first in history to be able to survive and replicate endlessly outside of the human body. Skloot covers the true story on the impact Henrietta’s cells, also known as HeLa cells, had on her family and the world of science. Although I was intrigued by the entire book and the concept of HeLa cells, what truly provoked me to want to further research the topic was the injustice Henrietta’s family was forced to face, and how they learned to cope with it.

The conversation of consent to medical research of one’s tissues is critical due to the increasing number of discoveries in the field of medicine. In the 1950s, Johns Hopkins Hospital encountered one example of an ethical problem regarding education in the realm of medical research. Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks does well in elaborating on this conflict. This true story involves an African American woman who, while undergoing treatment for cervical cancer, has her cells extracted from her without permission. Skloot achieves a more personal level of the story by describing the lives of Henrietta’s children, then and now, in addition to the story of Henrietta herself. Unfortunately, the Lacks family had a poor

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, is a book about an African-American woman, Henrietta Lacks, who had cervical cancer in the early 1950s. Henrietta went to John Hopkins hospital, one of the only hospitals to treatment African-Americans, they derived part of her cancer cells from her cervix and tried to keep growing her cells for research to try and discover a cure for cervical cancer. They have tried this on many patients before, but Henrietta’s cells were special and kept growing, while the other patient’s cells would die. However, Henrietta Lacks and her family had no idea about the doctors taking her cells and medical records and sending them to other doctors around the world. In Skloot’s book there are many ethical

The perception of what is right and wrong is always changing because of history. In particular, laws in the past were considered just, but as years passed people began to question the extent at which these laws were just. Various medical laws and bioethical issues pertaining to Henrietta Lack’s cells being stolen are discussed in Rebecca Skloot’s non-fiction work The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. A question Skloot addresses in the book is, “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 cells in research?” (Skloot 315). In her nonfiction work The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Skloot employs authoritative warrants to argue that while it was not illegal

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is based on the story of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer. It was during the time when race was still a big factor in the United States and the principle of medical ethical was in its early stages. One of the main themes of this book surrounded around the ethical issue of informed consent. During an operation to remove the cancerous tumor from Henrietta Lacks, Dr. George Gey took a sample of cancerous tissue from cervix without her consent. Also, her family was not informed of the sample that was taken out from Henrietta and it was years before they found out about the fate of their mother’s cells. The cell that was extracted from Henrietta, known as

Prior to reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks I had heard of the HeLa cells and their contribution to medical research, but I had never really known where they had come from. In fact, I had never even associated the cells I heard about with an actual human being before reading this book. I found the book intriguing in the way it interweaves the story of the Lack’s family with the scientific history, racial politics, and medical ethics. Not only did I learned a lot about the science surrounding the HeLa cells and the nature of medical ethics, I also learned about Henrietta and her family. Learning about the Lack’s family along with how much the HeLa cells have contributed to science helps to humanize the story and make it more than a scientific history and a

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebecca Skloot, begins by sharing Henrietta Lack’s journey of becoming the dehumanized HeLa cell. Henrietta was a poor, black woman who grew up in the era of institutionalized racism, which created no way for her to become educated and therefore, unable to further herself or her family. Skloot shows how Henrietta’s race dictated her life by leaving her with no choice in hospital, no chance in understanding her treatment, and no identity to her own ‘immortal’ cells.

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

The maltreatment of Henrietta Lacks, like other African Americans, is primarily due to the historical derogation of the racial group since they are perceived as subordinates within America, including the medical world. African Americans are branded as inferior in the fields of gynecology, biology, and genetics due to America’s historical degradation of African Americans seeping into the medical world. The gynecological practices presented within the text showcase the lack of basic ethical considerations of women, especially African American women since they received maltreatment due to both their race and gender. For example, the doctors who stole Henrietta’s cells felt that giving consent was not even worth it because the “colored women” do not pay for their treatment so stealing cells was their form of payment, but the hospital still had Lacks fill

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.