The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

As both Americans and people, our rights are limited and regulated by those in command. The enforcement of these regulations of just treatment is, unfortunately, more severe or less severe depending on race, gender, and wealth. Since the beginning of the United States, the oppression of people of color was present to the strongest extent. White, Europeans arrived in the Americas and looked at the people of color as beings brought to serve them. We forced them to work and when the Native people died out, the Europeans brought in African Americans as their new slaves in the 1700s. Since then, even though they fought to abolish slavery and for their rights, our country continues to treat them differently. This was the case of Henrietta Lacks,

Henrietta Lacks was born in Roanoke, Virginia on August 1, 1920. After 1924 when Henrietta's mother Eliza died giving birth to tenth child. Henrietta and her siblings where taken to her fathers hometown, clover. When all of the siblings arrived at clover they had to be divided and split up to live with different relatives in different homes. Henrietta ended up with Tommy Lacks, her grandfather and her cousin David Lacks also known as Day. As Henrietta grew older, she began to draw attention from he cousins Day and Joe. Since she had been sharing a room with Day ever since she got there she found herself pregnant with Day's child. At the age of fourteen she gives birth to her first child, Lawrence and at the age of eighteen she has her second

Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Her doctor at Johns Hopkins hospital took her tissues without informing her and grew them. When she died her tissue became HeLa cells which became the key to science research creating vaccines and medications. Race In the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was exploited by the doctors. It was a major issue and the doctors took advantage of their patients to receive what they wanted. It left people like Henrietta and her family uninformed because blacks were forbidden to ask questions.

What if someone used your body or parts of your body for science without your permission. Patients rights is the right to keep anything medically safe and locked away from the public. The only people that would see it would be your doctor or anyone you grant to give that information to. People nowadays have that privilege to keep it iblprivate but back in the mid to the nineteenth century people didn’t exactly have that right to keep their information private. There was research conducted with people’s DNA that that person did not know about. Some tried to sue and get money from the doctors or scientists that worked on their tissues and made money off of them. But most people back then did not know that doctors had taken samples when they would be getting an operation done or to go and just get their blood

In the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the author, Rebecca Skloot, dives into a vast amount of information regarding a women named Henrietta Lacks, whose name is very popular in the medical world. Henrietta’s cells became the first immortal cells known to man, and have changed the way the medical world works. Skloot’s book also contains material about a Public Health problem, which became a great risk for the entire community. In general, Public Health is the process of preventing disease and promoting a healthy lifestyle for the overall community. Public Health has three main functions, assessment, policy development, and assurance, which all work together to help establish a healthy environment. In the book, the topic of bioethics came into play during a

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, is about a poor African American Women named Henrietta Lacks, better known as “HeLa” to the rest of the world, whose Cells taken, unbeknownst to her, revolutionized the medical field. Henrietta, originally named Loretta Pleasant, was born on August 1, 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia. After her mother’s death when she was 4 years old, her father felt incapable of taking care of her, so she was given to her grandfather and raised an old plantation house with her fist cousin, whom she ended up marrying and having four children with. Her story really starts in 1951, after she went to Johns Hopkins Hospital because of what she described a “knot” inside her. Turns out she had adenocarcinoma of the cervix (cancer of the cervix) which caused the formation of many tumors. During the treatment of her Cervical Cancer, without her consent, two tissue samples of her cervix were removed. After examination of these samples, Dr. George Otto Gey observed something “never seen

Throughout the 1960’s medical health care was not as advanced and thorough like it is today. During the 1900’s, families were not as informed of their medical records than today due to a breakthrough in medical technology (Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks). In past years, hospital experience turned out to be quite lengthy stays for some people and had given a redundant insult with no respect to a patient. Some people had not been as beneficial as white people have. These problems should not even exist, it is just physical discrimination against people of different color.

Henrietta Lacks was a strong-willed, compassionate women that had a love for life. She always put her family first, not only her immediate family but her extended family as well. She never complained, worked hard and fought up until her death. She was humbled and lived a selfless life.

brown skin. Who died of cervical cancer in 1951 but a few months before her

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Henrietta never complained about the side effects of the chemotherapy treatment while she was suffering them. She was a strong woman. Judging by the strength Henrietta displays in the book, I believe that she would approve of their use without her consent if she could look back today because she put everyone before herself even while she was dying: “Henrietta didn’t tell anyone what Jones said. She simply went on with her day as if nothing had happened, which was like her – no sense upsetting anyone over something she could deal with herself (46)” In this quote, Henrietta initially chose not to tell anyone about her cancer diagnosis.

In “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot, Skloot discusses the life of Henrietta and her family. While doing so, Skloot reveals many central ideas such as misfortune and racism. These are all central ideas that took part in the story, but the one central idea that I found very important was the lack of information and communication. As the story was laying out, Henrietta was going through her radium treatments only to find out something she never knew would happen. On page 47 it states, “Toward the end of her treatments, Henrietta asked her doctor when she’d be better so she could have another child.

To discuss all the benefits that cultured cells would be hard to do just in this research paper. Nevertheless, we have discovered more from cultured cells in the last 20 years than we had in 50 years. Benefits that came from these cultured cells stem all the way from vaccines to starting cell lines. More scientific advancements include tons more on our genetics and DNA. We are able now to grow human body parts and help live longer lives too thanks to cultured cells. Nonetheless, cultured cells have given us countless benefits that have affected our history in science and humankind today. But the cells weren’t all benefits for Henrietta and the Lack’s family. Henrietta Lacks and the Lacks family were blown off by doctors for Henrietta’s diagnosis and the information that Lacks family was suppose to be given. To support my response here is a quote from “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” “ Warning patients about fertility loss before cancer treatment was standard practice at Hopkins, and something Howard Jones says he and TeLinde did with every patient. In fact, a year and a half before Henrietta came to Hopkins for treatment, in a paper about hysterectomy, TeLinde wrote:

The Scientific Method is the approach that scientists use to investigate some phenomena. It’s a standard technique to find cause and effect of a particular problem.

Basically, scientists distinguish their work from religion with the scientific process and the use of Intelligent design. By this, scientific research is used to provide evidence of design in nature—by an intelligent cause, and not an undirected process as in natural selection. With the design of specified systems and their interrelated components, one is able to determine, with some measure of conclusion, how the various natural structures evolve with chance, natural law and other observable measures. Science has a specified way of knowing about the world through the use of the scientific process with a primary goal of understanding nature through observation and recognizing the causes and effects from what has been observed. Progress

There are many definitions of what makes something scientific; many people have tried to write about it. According to the Collins English Dictionary, something is a science when a systematic study gives knowledge of natural or physical phenomena.