Book Report On Henrietta Lacks

What is HeLa? Who is Henrietta Lacks? And how did this single woman change the entire perspective of the medical field? These questions will be answered in this following book report. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about Henrietta, who was born a poor tobacco farmer, whose cells were taken without her consent, but she quickly became one of the most important tools for the medical field, yet her name remained virtually unknown.

Part One: Life- In the beginning, the author creates an interest in learning more about Henrietta by intriguing the reader and lured the reader's (us) into the book, leaving us curious about the chapter to come. You don’t want to stop reading because you want to know what happens next. The author has a great

They had no idea and were completely clueless of why they needed the blood. They also show this in the movie where a lady, Susan Hsu, comes to draw blood and rarely says anything about what she’s doing. This could be either or their faults because he could’ve explained, but she could’ve asked. I 100 percent agree that they should be penalized or be required to reimburse the Lacks family for using her tissue and selling it because the family never made a cent off of her cells, they never even told them what they had done to her cells, and they never even asked for the cells to begin with. I think the author agrees with me on how Henrietta should be treated because throughout the entire book, she sided with Henrietta and told from her perspective rather than the doctor. The Lacks family then somewhat changes from the beginning where they were “ride or die.” They didn’t seem as close as they were. Right then, they all looked as if they were all heading down the same path, the wrong path. Zakariyya was just out of prison, but had problems such as holding jobs, Sonny was in jail, and Alfred was on the same path. The Hayflick Limit is a concept that helps explain the mechanisms behind cellular aging. It says that a normal human cell can only replicate and divide forty to sixty times before it can’t divide and will break down into programmed cell death or apoptosis. Colfield managed to gain their trust by first being “ the cousin or Deborah’s husband’s former stepdaughter, or something like that” as well as when he called Deborah and sided with her saying she needed to protect herself and the copyright of her mom, Colfield was out to help them. They also agreed to go with him because of the price. I personally don’t think I would’ve been this persistent as Skloot in this situation because I’m not really interested in medicine, I like