Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

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

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