The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Essay

Henrietta Lacks was a Young African American woman who died of cervical cancer when she was only 31 years old. She discovered this cancer after feeling discomfort in her womb after having her daughter Deborah. She however did not seek medical attention and lived with it. A few months later though after her youngest son, Joe, was born, Henrietta began to have bleeding out of vagina at the wrong time of the month. One day she stuck her finger into her vagina while

Dr. George Gey was responsible for Henrietta’s treatment and as a result, gave him access to her cells; this allowed Gey to carry out tests on Henrietta’s cancer cells without her knowledge. This led to George Gey taking and culturing Henrietta’s without permission. That’s when Gey noticed something unusual about the cells, Henrietta’s cultured cells began to expand at a rapid rate, “They kept growing like nothing anyone had seen, doubling their numbers every twenty-four hours, stacking hundreds on top of hundreds, accumulating by the millions” (page 57). This demonstrates the growth of Henrietta’s cells and the importance of this discovery. Gey told his closest colleagues about his discovery which led to him distributing the cells to different

When Henrietta Lacks was thirty-years-old, she was diagnosed with cancer. She immediately knew she was suffering from an unknown disease, when she discovered a “knot” on her cervix. She quickly sought help in Baltimore at the Johns Hopkins

But Lacks’s story soon became exceptional when her cells were given to John Hopkin’s tissue specialist George Gey. Because when Gey looked at her cells under a microscope he found something he’d been searching for for years.

In the year 1951, Henrietta starting feeling discomfort and felt a knot in her womb. She went to the Hopkins Hospital, which is the only hospital that would give care to colored patients. This is the time of the Jim Crow era. where there is a practice of segregating black people. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer and treated with radium and x-ray therapy. This is also the time where scientist are trying to grow cells out of the body. Some of the tissue from Henrietta was removed from her tumor and sent down to George Gey's lab at Hopkins to be cultured, or grown, in test tubes. Neither Henrietta nor any of her family members knew about the tissue sample—and neither Gey

Henrietta Lacks died never knowing the impact her life would have on the world of medicine. A poor, black woman living in Baltimore, Maryland in the 1950s, Henrietta was diagnosed with cervical cancer and died only nine short months after her diagnosis at the age of thirty-one. The mother of five children, Henrietta most likely died thinking her family would be her legacy. Little did she know her doctor at John Hopkins hospital, George Gey, had taken some of her cells before she died. With Henrietta’s cells, Dr. Gey was finally able to achieve a goal he had been working toward for decades – creating the first line of immortal cells (Freeman). These cells have been used for countless scientific research and have solidified Henrietta Lacks’ place

From the moment Dr. Gey took Henrietta's cells without her consent and knowledge, she was no longer seen as human. She became only known as cells in a test tube. She was reduced to the label put on that tube, "HeLa". No longer was she known as a mother who put her children first, a friend, or a beautiful woman who always made

The cells taken from the biopsy of Henrietta’s tumor were given to a researcher, George Gey, and her cells became a huge medical discovery because they could survive and multiply indefinitely. These cells were then named HeLa cells. HeLa cells led to many revolutionary medical advances

Henrietta Lacks, a woman whose cells have made millions of dollars, but most people don’t know her name, or her story. “She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells – her cells cut from her cervix just months before she died. Her real name is Henrietta Lacks,” (Skloot 1). Through the last few months of her life, she had major struggles with hospitals and scientists. Henrietta was in serious pain throughout the last few months, and the doctor treated her as a specimen. “Henrietta is still a miserable specimen,” (Skloot 66). Another major flaw in Henrietta story is the fact that her family was barely told of her condition of cervical

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,

Gey found that Henrietta cells were different than the usual cells. It was never happening before when Gey found a cell that grows with mythological intensity in the lab. Usually, every cell will die or survive for a while in the lab. “However, the Henrietta’s cancer cells seemed unstoppable as long as they had food and warmth” (Skloot 65). This was the first immortal human cells that they called HeLa. This name came from the first two letters of the name Henrietta Lacks.

The Henrietta Lacks Foundation is a non-profit organization founded by Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, who is donating a portion of her book’s proceeds to the Foundation. Henrietta was a poor black farmer whose cancer cells had damaging consequences for her family who today can’t afford access to the health care advances their mother’s cells helped make possible. The Foundation strives to provide financial assistance to needy individuals who have made important contributions to scientific research without personally benefiting from those contributions, particularly those used in research without their knowledge or consent. The Foundation gives those who

Gey was able to contribute to the advancements made in science not only by collecting the cells but also by making an abundance of advancements in the field of cell culture. Being able to collect, cultivate, and ship the cells already contributed to the advancements made not only by making it possible to see the effects of certain diseases and vaccines on human cells but also because it showed new techniques of shipping live human cells: “Gey sent them [cells] via plane in tubes with a few drops of culture medium, just enough to keep them alive for a short time… [or] tucked them into holes carved in blocks of ice to keep them from overheating” (Skloot 57). This in turn allowed Henrietta’s legacy to grow because she could survive a long time with few necessities. Dr. Gey was able to show that in ice the cells slow their processes of metastasizing and this keeps them from dying; thus creating a process called spontaneous transformation allowing for scientist to observe a transforming somatic cell during the process of mitosis. This process was able to make Henrietta’s legacy grow as aiding the formation of the cell cycle. Dr. Gey also made a technique of “growing in suspension” in which “they [HeLa cells] could grow floating in a culture medium that was constantly stirred by a magnetic device” (pg 94) decreasing space required to hold the same amount of HeLa, allowing for more cells and more experimentation, which increased Henrietta’s legacy. Dr. Gey contributed a lot to

Henrietta Lacks: an unknown name up until recent years. A name that had been known to the world only as HeLa; The first two letters of a name that belonged to a poor African American tobacco farmer that unknowingly changed science and life as we know it today. Her life has finally been portrayed in a very intimate story that not only does her life some justice but also transcendentally brings to mind the philosophical issues concerning medical ethics both of the past, present, and the future. In a world of constantly evolving medical advancement, science is a pivotal force that propels ideas forward. Although most will agree that the knowledge and cures found are a positive aspect, there is also a necessary evil that is involved, including

Henrietta Lacks was a “mother of five who died of cervical cancer at only thirty-one years of age” (Gabbay). When she passed away the doctors at John Hopkins asked her husband,