Summary: The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

The lifetime of Henrietta Lacks is a deterrent tale that reflects the intrinsic contradiction between the known purpose of medical research to provide profit to humans and the disturbing reality of deliberate profiteering in advancements in science. Rebecca Skloot was not the first to investigate recognized racism and ethics in medicine and this exposition should not be taken as a review of her innovative research for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Yet the book focuses on medical institutions which have successfully adopted the strategies which have been caught engaging in bad practices over the years. Matthew C. Nisbet and Declan Fahy in "Bioethics in Popular Science: Evaluating the Media Impact of the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

From the Henrietta situation it seems that more change gave been implemented to fix this major issue. But with every situation, there are loopholes that are evident in these consents. Hoeyer and Hogle state “Absence of proper consent is currently being construed as an ‘intolerable.’ Policies enforcing the consent requirement assume that there is a universal subject, that all subjects weigh information and make “informed” choices similarly, and that they “voluntarily” participate with similar expectations” (352). The question of ethics that is raised is what rights do individuals have over their own blood, tissue and cells when it is being used in research. That argument that most pose is that Hela cells are and continue to help scientists discover numerous amounts of treatments to ailments. In this case, the ethics behind major research is over ridden by the desire for knowledge and the next advancements. Jennings and Dawson state “Bioethics has the potential to offer society a keener insight and perception of what is ethically at stake in controversies concerning health, science, and society. This insight is what we shall refer to as a “moral imagination,” by which we do not mean make-believe or fantasy but, rather, the capacity to take a critical distance from the given, to think reality otherwise” (35). There are always facts that are fabricated to make up for any mistake or issue that might be prevailing.

The attitudes towards blacks was very different in the 1950’s in the everyday life and every aspect of life to be realistic. Skloot states “But today when people talk about history of Hopkin's relationship with the black community, the story many of them hold up as the worst offense is that of Henrietta Lacks-- a black woman whose body, they say, was exploited by white scientists” (168). Hospitals were segregated but luckily John Hopkins Hospital. In the research world, blacks were used as guinea pigs for research studies. A prominent example of blacks being taken advantage of for medical research was the Tuskegee syphilis study in which Skloot describes:
The Tuskegee syphilis study -- they recruited hundreds of African-American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful, and preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin could cure them. The research subjects didn't ask questions. They were poor and uneducated, and the researchers offered incentives: free physical exams, hot meals, and rides into town on clinic days, plus fifty-dollar burial stipends for their families when the men died