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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Analysis

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“Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness” (Immanuel Kant). Morality is the divergence between right and wrong in every aspect of life. The history of the world has demonstrated human need to attain sovereignty. In the journey to achieve this goal, people have forgotten the gravity of the steps taken to complete an ideal and have only focused on the result. There have been several examples where detrimental actions have been taken by fortunate people to accomplish their goals. Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman, living in the early 1900s in eastern United States. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital at the age of 31, on January 29, 1951. The doctors prescribed her treatment plan as several Radium sessions and an initial surgery to help extirpate the tumor from her body. However, in her first surgery, without obtaining consent, the doctors extracted more than just her tumor. They took samples Henrietta’s cells. Using them, scientist George Gey was able to initiate the first immortal human cell line, denominated HeLa, and help cure various diseases. However, taking advantage of Henrietta’s race and socioeconomic status the doctors never informed her family about her revolutionary cells. …show more content…

In the poignant memoir, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by the tenacious reporter and compelling author Rebecca Skloot, the disingenuous doctors were immoral when extracting the precious HeLa cells without

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