Analysis Of The Poem ' The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks ' Essay

Written by Rebecca Skloot, the novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, utilizes the three major rhetorical appeals in order to convey her purpose to the readers. In attempt to expose the HeLa cells, Skloot is successful in creating many complicated views on the story such as trust. The main purpose of this book is to inform readers in effort to create discussion about the ethics behind the tragic story of Henrietta Lacks through her expert manipulation of ethos, pathos, and logos. Within the first few pages, ethos is established heavily.

Elie Wiesel has stated “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph” (as cited in Skloot, 2010, p. 1). This paper will examine the many ways in which Henrietta Lacks, a relatively poor African woman whose cells were extracted from her without any consent, was viewed primarily as an abstraction rather than a person by the scientific community and the media; and the consequences that ensued as a result.

Henrietta Lacks is not a common household name, yet in the scientific and medical world it has become one of the most important and talked names of the century. Up until the time that this book was written, very few people knew of Henrietta Lacks and how her cells contributed to modern science, but Rebecca Skloot aimed to change this. Eventually Skloot was able to reach Henrietta’s remaining family and through them she was able to tell the story of not only the importance of the HeLa cells but also Henrietta’s life.

Following that, one of the doctors by the name of George Gey, stole Henrietta’s cells without her consent to use in medical research. When discovering HeLa cells, George Gey does not give recognition to Henrietta. Instead, HeLa factories were being built and selling Henrietta’s cells to be experimented on to create new life forms. Medical research consent was not a common practice back in the day. Patients would get taken advantage of, dead or alive.

The scientific community’s careless mistreatment of the Lacks family began with dehumanizing Henrietta’s cells in the very first lab. Generalizing people can especially be easy when one is working with their cells in a lab. The many scientists working on Henrietta’s cells must have found it easy to separate the cells from the person and reduce them to tools to aid them in the task at hand. This view may be harmless when it comes to the individual scientist, and the individual cell, but this view extended to the entire Lacks family and caused them much harm. “Meanwhile, Victor McKusick and Susan Hsu had just published the results of their research in

The non-fiction book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebecca Skloot, details the happenings and life of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman and tobacco farmer who became a medical miracle in the 1950’s. The book is written in an attempt to chronicle both the experiences and tribulations of Henrietta Lacks and her family, as well as the events that led to, and resulted from, research done on Henrietta Lacks’ cells. Henrietta was a very average African American woman in this period; she had only a seventh-grade level education, and followed traditional racial and gender roles by spending her time has a mother and caretaker, as well as working on farms throughout her life until the involvement of the US in World War II brought her and her husband, “Day” Lacks, comparatively better work opportunities in industrial steel mills. However, after her death in 1951 Henrietta became much more than average to doctors at John Hopkins when the discovered that cells extracted from her cancerous tissue continued to live and grow much longer than any other tissue samples. Further investigation and isolation of these thriving cells led to the creation of the first ever immortal human cell line in medical history. The incredible progress in medicine made possible by Henrietta Lack’s tissue cells were not without downfalls, though. The treatments and experiences received by Henrietta and the effects it had on her and her family demonstrate both racial and gender

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.

In the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. She has composed this biography of Henrietta Lacks to inform her readers about the hard reality that the Lacks family went through. In order to grasp a better understanding about this novel we will first uncover some details about Henrietta and her cells. Next, we will discuss how she came from a large family and that they were originally from Virginia. Finally, we will examine what she did after she moved to Baltimore and what happened after the move throughout the first two chapters.

Rebecca Skloot, the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, vividly described a series of disturbing events that took place. Henrietta was a woman who helped changed the face of medicine. Her cancerous cells never died. Scientists and doctors experimented with them and created new treatments to various diseases. The disturbing events that occur after the death of Henrietta are crucial if her story is to be told correctly. Some of these events include sexual assault to one of Henrietta’s daughters, the beating of Joe, Henrietta’s son, as a child, and torture to people with illnesses like Elise, another one of Henrietta’s daughters.

2. Part 1: In Part 1 of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Dr. George Gey had to make many decisions based on his values and ethics. When his lab received samples of Henrietta Lacks cancerous cervix

Rebecca Skloot’s bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, begins with a quote from World War II concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel, “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own source of anguish” (Wiesel qtd. in Skloot n. pag.). This quote serves as a preview of the book and its underlying moral purposes, as Henrietta Lacks and her family are continually treated as objects without rights to their privacy and without regards to their worth or feelings. The dehumanization of the Lacks family by the media and scientific community not only resulted in consequences for the family, but influenced society, as well.

Why are people dehumanized to the point of becoming an abstraction? For the advancement of science and medicine? Henrietta Lacks was one of the abounding numbers of people invaded and taken advantage of, all in the name of science. Elie Wiesel’s epigraph as an introduction to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks unmasks the injustices inflicted upon Henrietta, exhibiting how scientists created her into a mere abstraction, disregarding the treasures, anguish, and a measure of triumph that constituted Henrietta’s truth as a human being.

In Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, she told the story of how a

After her death in 1951, for six decades, Henrietta Lacks did not exist in the eyes of the society, but her cells did. How? Well, the answer is quite simple. HeLa Cells are the first immortal human cells. These cells never die and multiply every twenty-four hours. After spending 10 years to perfect her first book, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot essentially captured the life, the death, and aftermath of Henrietta Lacks’ life. With controversial issues regarding science, ethics, race, and class Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey. From the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover,

The medical community did not explain to or inform the Lacks family of the HeLa cells; along the way the scientists altogether forgot that Henrietta and her family were not abstractions but actual people. The family felt that this was unethical; they felt their mother was robbed and taken advantage of. Despite the spread of HeLa cells and the whirlwind of new research that followed, there were no recent news or stories about “the birth of the amazing HeLa cell line” (Skloot 58). In the beginning, when Gey had kept the origin of the cells- or Henrietta - a secret, no one knew where the cells had came from and no one cared to ask.