Henrietta Lacks Rebecca Skloot Summary

“They certainly give very strange names to diseases.” - Plato

Rebecca Skloot wanted to get this word across about how race, class, ethics, and other factors play a role in the science world today. Especially with the need of biological samples for research. When Skloot first found out about the cells, her father had gotten sick with an illness that was undiagnosable. Once it was determined he had brain damage, he had enrolled in a medical study. She had took him to many doctors appointments, and everything for the study. So when her professor begun talking about the HeLa cells, it sparked a similarity with her own father.

In Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 tribute, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, to reveal the troubles the Lacks family had finding out information of a deceased love one, whose cells have contributed to medical history. Throughout her writing Rebecca uses a southern vernacular, to help re-create the time with Henrietta Lacks family.

Deborah believes some scientists in London had cloned a human looking just like her mother. Skloot explains that the scientists had cloned her mother’s cells, not a human. Deborah still believes otherwise, and compares what they are doing to Jurassic Park. ¨¨ I saw this movie a bunch of times,” she said. ¨They talking about the genes and taking them from cells to bring that dinosaur back to life and I 'm like, Oh Lord, I got a paper on how they were doing that with my mother 's cell too!¨¨ (Skloot, TILHL Passage) Though Skloot had told Deborah what she thought was wrong, Deborah still believed what they were doing with her mother 's cells, was exactly like Jurassic Park. Which in this case, it wasn 't they were just cloning cells not humans. And this whole thing has happened only because Deborah 's mother 's cells were taken without