Summary Of The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

Nonfiction books can often expand ones knowledge, especially in the subject of science. In the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, writer of the book and journalist Rebecca Scloot finds herself looking at an image of an African American whom had a tumor growing in her body without knowledge of it. This woman in the photo, Henrietta Lacks, although her name was unknown by most scientist and teachers, helped change the face of medicine back then and even today. Henrietta Lacks started getting treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital at age 31. The physicians at the hospital cut a dime size piece of her tumor and sent it into the lab where George Gey then put it on clots of chicken blood to see if the cells would grow.

Consent is important because what if Henrietta didn’t want her tumor to be used for research. What if she did want it to be taken out? The patient should know and agree to anything happening to his or her body. This is a controversial situation because her family has never received any compensation for this discovery or for any other uses of the HeLa cells. The family did not have any kind of insurance and had a slew of other health issues they need help with but got nothing. In an interview with Debra DeBruin, Ph.D., director of the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics, journalist Erin McHenry questioned her about the ethical issues with the Lack’s HeLa cell case. The family never understand what all was going on. They were never told any information about what their family member was truly going through, they just knew about the cancer, completely uniformed about the HeLa cell discovery. The information on the cells was out of reach to the Lack family. It wasn’t until 2013 that the Lack’s family received some reimbursement for the Henrietta’s contribution to science when a European Molecular Biology Laboratory sequenced and published Henrietta’s genome without family

They threw around fake names, such as Helen Larsen, to throw them off track. Her real name wasn’t told to the world until the 70s. While this can be seen as good because of patient confidentiality, they still shared all of her medical issues, which is now illegal without permission so lack of privacy was a big issue here as well once her true name really did get out. But like it was stated before, they didn’t ask her or her family for any permission of any kind to do anything. Of course some may say that these are racial issues and were not cared about by the doctors because Lack’s and her family were of the minority race, it could have easily been a mistake of