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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

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Recommended: Principles of medical ethics

It took the Author Rebecca Skloot approximately 10 years to reveal the truth behind the HeLa cells, stolen by doctors and Scientists from a woman, Henrietta Lacks, in 1951. Skloot exposes how Doctors and scientist took advantage of Henrietta Lacks and her cells known as HeLa cells. Even after Henrietta death the neither doctors nor scientists told anyone about Henrietta cells, they were experimented, sold, and bought by many others. African0 Americans were kept in the dark, in “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” Skloot managed to explain the unethical situations towards the African Americans.
The Hospital John Hopkins named after its founder, John Hopkins, was built in 1889 as a charity Hospital for those with financial issues or discrimination. …show more content…

Henrietta Lacks was born as Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia, on august 1, 1920. Henrietta Lacks like many other African Americans with financial issue or discrimination got treated in John Hopkins. African Americans such as Henrietta Lacks would not go to the Hospital unless they deemed necessary. With the lack of education African American knowledge was not deep enough to understand. Henrietta education went only as far as 6th grade; her husband day education went as far as 1st grade. Due to their little knowledge doctors and scientist had taken advantage of them. Africans Americans for them it seemed as if they were the new foreign exchange student in a classroom were everyone speaks a different language, (pg16) Skloot mentioned “For Henrietta, walking into Hopkins was like entering a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language. She knew about harvesting tobacco and butchering a pig, but she’d never heard the words such as cervix or biopsy……” Due to here education most African Americans only went to the hospital when it deemed necessary to them. They would go to the hospital with faith and trust that towards the doctors. It was like an unknown law to them that they should not question what the Doctors do to them, so when the doctors would tell them about a surgery they would take it in and say ok, have the surgery and go back to their everyday

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a book written by Rebecca Skloot. Chapter 1 begins shortly after Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, and her son, Joe, were born. After those two were born, she then began to experience vaginal bleeding at the wrong time of the month. Feeling like something was wrong, Henrietta rushed to the doctor. She only went to see the doctor “If she felt she had no other choice”.

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Henrietta Lacks was a black tobacco farmer from the south who, in 1950, at the age of 30, she was diagnosed with aggressive cervical cancer. Lacks went to John’s Hopkins medical center for treatment for her cancer. In April of 1951, she underwent surgery to remove the larger tumor on her cervix. Henrietta Lacks, died three days following the surgery. Even though Henrietta Lacks died, her cells from the tumor have lived on and have made a major impact on the biomedical community.

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“Was It Illegal for Doctors to Take Cells from Henrietta Lacks Without her Consent?” How can you take cells from a human being and treat them as clothes that you’re just selling. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot told the story of the woman behind the famous cell line and the fact that her family did not know about Lacks’ immortal cells until more than 20 years after her death. Some believe it was legal to take Mrs. Lacks cells, while others disagree and say it’s illegal. It was definitely illegal for the doctors and scientist to take Henrietta’s cells without her consent.

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of Henrietta, an African-American woman whose cells were used to create the first immortal human cell line. Told through the eyes of her daughter, Deborah Lacks, aided by journalist Rebecca Skloot. Deborah wanted to learn about her mother, and to understand how the unauthorized harvesting of Lacks cancerous cells in 1951 led to unprecedented medical breakthroughs, changing countless lives and the face of medicine forever. It is a story of medical arrogance and triumph, race, poverty and deep friendship between the unlikeliest people. There had been many books published about Henrietta’s cells, but nothing about Henrietta’s personality, experiences, feeling, life style etc.

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The media and scientific community are guilty of viewing Henrietta Lacks and her family as abstractions. Nonetheless, the central argument of the book is that the scientific community has an ethical obligation to respect the dignity, autonomy, and person-hood of all subjects and individuals with whom it comes into contact. Accordingly, individuals cannot be made into subjects of scientific inquiry without their consent. And, when objects of scientific study (including, for example, the physical material scientists use within a laboratory setting) are sourced from individual people, those individuals deserve to be made aware of such sourcing, and when possible they ought to be appropriately compensated. Therefore, you can see how the scientific

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The story, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, explores the true story of a woman named Deborah and her journey to discover more information about her mother and what her cells did for humanity. Deborah’s mother, Henrietta, died of cancer and her cells, which were attained by inhumane means, contributed greatly to the scientific study of curing other diseases. Although, Henrietta’s death also had a great impact on Deborah due to the fact that Deborah had to face certain difficult situations. With her passing, Deborah was forced to live with a cousin of her mother, who abused her and had a husband who also verbally and sexually mistreated her. The abuse is prominently shown when Galen, the husband, screams at Henrietta, “Get back here till I finish with you, Dale!

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