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Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

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Science and ethics have been colliding back and forth for centuries. Science want to discover new technologies to help people and for other selfish reason. People want medical help to save their loved ones. Many times scientists have sacrificed the good of a few for the needs of many.In Rebecca Skloot's modern day investigative biography The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Rebecca Skloot uses Pathos to develop the themes of immorality and unethical behavior of medical science.

The first medical code requiring patient consent was the Nuremberg code which was "revolutionary”(Skloot). Voluntary human consent to experimentation is " absolutely necessary” (Skloot). Authors convey emotion with deliberate and thought out word choice word choice. Rebecca Skloot instill emotion with her readers when she told them of how in 1947 humans were getting their rights in medicine for the first time. Skloot used the emotions form the inability to trust our doctors to better understand the fear of doctors that lived in the black community. Bluntly …show more content…

According to newspapers at that time,“the Nuremberg Code didn’t seem to apply to the United States”(Skloot 133). It was unsettling to many at that time that American doctors felt above the rules. this allowed Skloot to emphasise our emotions of fear of doctors above the law and what the could have done. In the modern world one should have not feared the men who were supposed to heal them. One example of doctors who felt above the law was Dr. TeLinde. Doctor TeLinde often: “used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge”(Skloot 29). Many poor citizens in the 40’s and 50’s feared doctors and apparently for good reason. Skloot uses words like often to show that unconsented experimentation was common practice and stirred up our emotions again of the fear of doctors without restrictions of on whom they could

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a novel written by Rebecca Skloot, a science reporter, depicting the lives of Henrietta Lacks’s family and their connection between them and Henrietta’s famous cancer cells “HeLa Cells”. Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951 and was treated with radium and radiation therapy. During her treatment process, the tumor and other cancerous tissue that was removed from her body was sent George Gey's lab at Hopkins to be grown in test tubes all without Lacks’s consent or knowledge. The cells were successfully able to divide and give the scientific community a good supply of human cancer cells to experiment on. The Lacks’s family was never informed about the cells even when there were amazing

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This led to major breakthroughs in the medical world and allowed scientists to experiment effects of toxins and cures. “If the whole profession is doing it, how can you call it 'unprofessional conduct'?" (Skloot, 134) Skloot wrote this book to unveil the injustices that the Lacks family and many other African-Americans went through. The key passage shows that many medical professionals used the “everyone else is doing it” defense to justify their unethical behavior.

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This essay uses the book“ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot to investigate the requirements of informed consent ,by informing the patients through every steps Henrietta’s story is an example on informed consent. On one hand theorists such as, Dale Keigner argue that informed consent should be notified by the doctor to the patient and the patient should be knowledge on the proceeding that the doctors will maintain. On the other hand , Lewis Soloman contends that the doctors should be able to take any specimens from the patient after operating without consent for scientific reasons and research. . He also asserted that doctors should be able to deduct any specimen that will be able to help in the science research. Others maintain

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In the novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks the author Rebecca Skloot brings up the topic of education various times throughout these seven chapters and thus helps the reader understand what a big discovery it was when Henrietta cells were found to be immortal and the medical revolution it brought. Henrietta Lacks was born August, 21, 1920 as a Loretta Pleasant and is unknown how she became Henrietta Lacks according to Skloot(pg.18) and in the distance future she would eventually visit Hopkins Hospital and inevitably starts the process of how her cells created a medical revolution and a multimillion-dollar industry. January, 29th, 1951 Henrietta went into Hopkins Hospital for a knot she felt in her womb and thus was examined by her doctor Howard Jones and was diagnosed with cervical cancer, in the past year Henrietta knew something was wrong with her but was too scared to go to the hospital for fear they would take her womb but eventually after she had her fifth child Joe that year she went to her local doctor but was referred to Hopkins after her knot tested negative for syphilis. Only a few days later after her visit to Hopkins; Jones got her tests and resulted in that she had Epidermoid Carcinoma of the cervix ,

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853 Words | 4 Pages

They were not educated so when the doctor would say something scientific they would trust every word while not even understanding what he was saying. This part of informed consent was stressed throughout the book because in today’s society most people have enough education to have a general idea what is going on when they are at the hospital about to have a procedure done, making it seem

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TIC673 HeLa Assignment 2018 In one of the best seller novel, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” the author Rebecca Skloot describes about the first human immortal cells that lived in laboratory culture and about the story of black, 31-year-old woman from whom these cells were obtained. The cells which not only proved to be most important in the field of medicine but also brought medical revolution were obtained from her without her or her family’s knowledge leading to the most debatable ethical issues. The following essay would describe the cell’s contribution to science, how they were obtained and some of the ethical issues violated. Henrietta’s cells did much good for the society.

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Skloots book goes on to expose the unscrupulous way the hospital treated the family, and also shows it might not have been just them. What the world was told to know was the outbreak of the precious tumor cells that would help with sicknesses and mend the families being torn. Without the founding of

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1263 Words | 6 Pages

Devon Moore Professor Dunbar English 111 19 September 2017 Title Cells that are known as HeLa are a line of immortal human cells that were developed from an African American woman in the 1950’s. They continue to be very well-known to the world of science today as they are still used. The HeLa cells are known for contributing to a lot of medical advancements. Scientists have now converted these cells into drugs to help create many different treatments for various cancers and diseases.

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This was 1951 in Baltimore, segregation was law, and it was understood that black people didn't question white people's professional judgment. Many black patients were just glad to be getting treatment since discrimination in hospitals was widespread” (Skloot

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The themes in the novel tell a complete story of life, science, and the science of life. “It was very dehumanizing to be thought of as Mo, to be thought of as Mo in the medical records: ‘Saw Mo today.’ ” (Skloot 201). This animal like referral to patients then demonstrates just how far medical ethics has come. It also proves that these dehumanizing tactics are a major theme in the story.

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The life and death of Henrietta Lacks is a cautionary tale that reflects the inherent contradiction between the stated purpose of medical research to provide benefit to humankind and the reality of blatant profiteering in the name of the advancement of

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1184 Words | 5 Pages

The Lacks family had reporters and researchers approach them before, but none of them treated them the way Skloot did. Skloot, who learned about HeLa cells in highschool, was interested in the history and background of Henrietta, rather than the scientific facts. Although she was repeatedly rejected by the now cautious and paranoid Lacks family, who, at first, only saw her as a greedy reporter coming to bring even more upheaval into the family’s lives, Skloot was finally able to build a relationship with the family, namely Deborah, and invested into their lives, all the while writing the novel that would finally bring Henrietta’s story to light. Skloot had a different approach than the scientific community and media because she didn’t see Henrietta as an abstraction, but as an “universe with its own secrets,” which she so willingly shared with the

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672 Words | 3 Pages

Skloot continues to use tone to develop the central idea. The chapter, "Illegal, Immoral, and Deplorable" from Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, states "But Southam wasn't their doctor, and he wasn't withholding upsetting health information. The deception was for his benefit - he was withholding information because patients might have refused to participate in his study if they'd known what he was injecting. " This shows that Skloot has a negative attitude toward the subject.

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According to Henrietta, physicians at the Hopkins during the 1950s and early 1960s claimed to offer to treat African American patients but in contrary, they did so in a manner that showed segregation especially from the fellow white families. Another strategy to ensure that African Americans did not receive treatment in medical institutions is that there were education and language barrier. According to Skloot, these factors kept the backs away from these institutions unless they thought they had no choice, pg. 16.

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1096 Words | 5 Pages

In the reading of Skloot, the big issue is the taking of Henrietta’s cells without her or family’s knowledge which is a violation of something very important and secret to Americans. The right to privacy is so important because a patient needs to know that a hospital, doctor, and nurse can be trusted with their medical information whether it is a small medical issue, or something major and embarrassing. You want to know that that information is not going to be out for the world to know or that information is going to be used somewhere else without your knowledge. In Provision 1 of the Guide to the Code of Ethics for Nurses, it is stated that “worth or value that people have simply because they are human not by virtue of any social standing, ability to evoke admiration, or any particular set of talents, skills, or powers.” (Flower, pp.8)

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