The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks is about a woman’s cancer and how her “immortal” cells furthered today’s scientific knowledge. “Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia, on August 1, 1920” (Skloot 18). When Henrietta was 4, her mom died and her dad left her with her grandfather, Tommy Lacks in Clover, Virginia. She stayed in Clover with her cousins and worked on a tobacco farm from dawn till dusk. Henrietta shared a bedroom with one of her cousins, David “Day” Lacks so what happened after didn’t surprise anyone. Henrietta had her first son, Lawrence just after her 14th birthday. Together, Henrietta and Day had 5 children, Elsie, Lawrence, Sonny, Deborah, and Joe (who later renamed himself Zakariyya). During

In 1951 Henrietta omplained of a “knot in her uterus” and went to John Hopkins Hospital, a charity hospital for the poor and black, to get it checked out. Her doctor diagnosed the hard lump as cervical cancer and started radiation treatments immediately. Because of the cancer Henrietta couldn’t take care of Elsie, her oldest female child that epilepsy with her other four children. So Henrietta sent Elsie to the Crownsville State Hospital or, hospital for the negro insane until she died a little while after her mother at the age of 15. During one of her surgery’s, her doctor secretly took a slice of her tumor and gave it to Dr. George Gey, a scientist who was trying to find an “immortal cell”. Not only did Gey find what he was looking for, he found cells that grew at an abnormal rate. After many months of excruciatingly painful radiation treatments her body filled with tumors and “Henrietta died at 12:15 a.m. on October 4, 1951” (Skloot 86). When Henrietta died she left her kids with a dad that works constantly, so Day had no other choice but to leave the children with Henrietta’s cousin Galen and his wife Ethel. Lawrence, the oldest child, was lucky enough to have escaped Ethel by leaving for the pool halls and enlisting in the military but Sonny, Deborah and Joe were

Galen didn’t whip the children like his wife, although he sexually harassed Deborah by touching her where it wasn’t right while she couldn’t do anything about it. Finally when Lawrence came back home his girlfriend, Bobbette Cooper, she realized that Ethel and Galen were abusing the kids, so she took them under her roof and raised them like her own. HeLa cells became known very quickly and Gey gave it to anyone who wanted it for research experiments. Later on a whole multi-billion business came out of culturing and selling HeLa cells. Gey never told anyone HeLa’s real name out of doctor patient confidentiality and because of this the Lacks family still had no idea that scientists were using Henrietta’s cells all around the world. When George Gey died in 1973 he finally told people the cells came from a colored woman named Henrietta lacks. All of a sudden many reporters and scientists started contacting the Lack’s family, but little did they know this was the first time the Lack’s heard that Henrietta cells were still living. The Lacks family was mad because HeLa was making millions of dollars but Henrietta’s own family cant even afford health insurance. Due to all the scam jurnalists in 1980-1990’s, the lacks didn’t trust anyone talking to them about Henrietta That is