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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

1189 Words5 Pages

Technical Difficulties Essay From light bulbs to airplanes, technology comes in a variety of forms. But how do people manage the hiccups the invention brings? The gothic novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley introduces Victor Frankenstein, a bright person looking to explore and gain an adequate understanding of life and death. He created a creature without thinking of the question, "What next?" Subsequently, it backfired due to his carelessness, leading his creation to cause harm to the people closest to him. "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot is a non-fiction novel about the injustice the Lacks family faced regarding Henrietta Lacks' cells. The cells recovered from her body were a key component of the advances today, but …show more content…

They both talk about how it would affect the environment, whether it was positive or negative. When creating technology, the safety of humans, animals, and the environment should be a priority. Additionally, staying within ethical limits is crucial to ensuring the pros outweigh the cons. Shelly’s novel Frankenstein brings to life a story where Victor Frankenstein creates an advanced being using electricity and chemicals to reanimate the deceased once more. Harmlessly, the creature tells Victor, "Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine;my joints more supple."(89) This shows Victor created a creature with an abnormal set of abilities; the creature is superior in every aspect in comparison to a human. Continuously, the creature knows its capabilities, indicating that Victor does not have a backup plan if something should go wrong. Therefore, it is clear that Victor did not behave responsibly when using technology. Without a doubt, the benefiting factors of the creature could have been a possibility because "[it] rushed from [its] hiding-place and with extreme labour, from the force of the current, saved her and …show more content…

These cells were deemed helpful because they allowed scientists to conduct experiments as well as aid in the advancement of the medical field. Supportingly, the cells are "...forever—bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world." (44) This shows that without the cells, it is possible we wouldn't be as advanced in the knowledge we now have on treatments for herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson's disease. Equally important, "they’ve been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers."(44) This is important because not only have they been used for treatments, but they also provided a variety of information that certainly made life easier by giving people more options to combat their issues. To balance against the benefits, the scientist's inability to compensate Henrietta Lacks' family was irresponsible because "she's the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty."(168) This means that after all of the uses of the HeLa cells, they were still struggling to make ends meet as they were yet to receive health insurance. Furthermore, Henrietta’s son Lawrence got upset

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Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

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HeLa was an immortal line of cells that led to many scientific discoveries. The book “The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks” has many different points you can view from. The book shows how history changed over time, how being African American and poor gets you no rights to privacy, and most importantly how medicine advanced because of Henrietta’s cells. Henrietta was one of ten children. Her mother died while giving birth in a barn.

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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 was something new to them and it hadn’t been seen before. The reason for being a discovery is that before the cells that had been cultured from other cells would only survive for a few days. However, with Henrietta’s cells they were able to isolate one specific cell, multiply it and start the HeLa cell line (Henrietta Lacks Biography (1920–1951)). They named them HeLa after her first two letters of her first name and the first two letters of her last name. These cells were the first human cells grown in a lab, and were used to conduct many experiments.

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Henrietta Lacks was a thirty-one year old African American who had five kids and married her cousin David Lacks. Henrietta was diagnosed with cervical cancer, the doctors never informed Mrs. Lacks that her cells were to be tested on. The Lacks family was certainly not advised that Henrietta 's cells were growing at an incredible rate. Because of this, the cancer cells were shipped and bought across the world. The last 8 months of Henrietta’s death became a piece of history nobody would ever want to forget.

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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

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HeLa cells were used in all kinds of research and cure many diseases. They were used in the first mission to space to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity, they were a very important part to finding the polio vaccine, they were used in cloning, gene mapping and also in vitro fertilization (History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places/ Smithsonian). Henrietta never had claim to her cell and what they did until 20 years after she died and finally, even after efforts to keep it hiding, in 1970s her real name started to leak out into the

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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

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The HeLa cells not only survived, they grew intensely and kept right on growing as much as their given space would allow. It seemed like the cells would never stop growing, thus came the label of the immortal cells (Skloot, 2010). HeLa cells became a very important part of scientific research, and Henrietta’s name became well-known among Gey’s colleagues. On November 2, 1953, the real name behind the HeLa cells was leaked by the press, but they got it wrong, Henrietta Lakes was reported as the source of the cells in the Minneapolis Star. Gey and Dr. TeLinde, the cervical cancer specialist at John Hopkins, decided to allow their story about Henrietta to be told in a more accurate account, but they wanted to withhold her name.

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Dr. George Otto Gey Rebecca Skloot writes in The Life of Henrietta Lacks, part two “Death” how she was able to contact the family and describes the medical research on HeLa cells. Rebecca Skloot has a hard time getting a hold of the family since trust is a big issue. To illustrate, since Henrietta Lacks cell are legendary in the medical and science community the Lacks family been bombarded with people trying to get information about Henrietta. Because of this, Rebecca, had to first gain the trust of the family before she will be able to talk to the family. Scientist and doctor used Henrietta’s cells on animals and people to study the effects of the cancer cells and gain new knowledge.

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Dana Garcia Ripley Honors English 2 20 March 2017 Lack of Justice The book The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot tells the story of an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks whose cells made one of the greatest medical contributions ever. Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer at the age of 31. Cells were taken from her body without her knowledge. Rebecca L. Skloot is a self-employed science writer who specializes in science and medicine.

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Henrietta Lacks The purpose of Rebecca Skloot’s book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” is to tell the story of Henrietta Lacks, her illness, and how she completely changed science without even knowing it. Henrietta Lacks, a name that had been known to the world only as HeLa up until recent years; the first two letters of a name that belonged to a poor African American tobacco farmer. Henrietta Lacks was a woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951 and HeLa, the line of cells taken from Henrietta that were the first line of cells to reproduce and survive in the lab indefinitely.

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The polio vaccine, the revolutionary steps regarding cancer research, and even obtaining the ability to put a man on the moon, were some of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. All these achievements were thanks to HeLa cells. Cancerous cells from Helen Lane. Or so that is all we knew of the origins of the cells before the early 70’s. The massive debate and controversy over Henrietta Lacks cells, their ownership, and their rights added more conflict and more worries to the mountain of distress and tensions during the Cold War.

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Without these cells we would not have been able to successfully or humanly learn many of the things that we know now. These cells helped teach us about diseases, how to cure/treat them, and humans as a whole. These cells provided the human genetic material we needed in order to make discoveries without harming or testing on people. Although the way these cells were cultured in the beginning was very inhumane they stopped many more dangerous or inhumane acts from being committed in the name of research. HeLa cells were the base of many discoveries that shaped our modern science and

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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

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As soon as Gey realized what he had discovered he ordered a large factory to be built to mass produce HeLa cells, its main purpose was to discover a cure for Polio (Skloot, Pg. 93), but not only did it provide aid in the medical world, but companies such as cosmetic corporations could test the effects of their makeup and other cosmetics on cell health (Skloot, Pg. 102). The possibilities of research with HeLa cell were endless, anything from the research on atomic radiations effect on cells and how to reverse the damage, to the discovery of cells being able to live on after the extraction of their nucleus, and even the vast amount of studies of chemotherapy drugs, hormones, vitamins, and environmental stress proved the importance of HeLa cells in modern research (Skloot, Pg. 102). For the first time ever, scientists were able to properly identify the correct number of chromosomes and map them out, this further lead to the ability of being able to diagnose diseases where individuals had an excess or lack of chromosomes such as Trisomy 21 or Klinefelter syndrome (Skloot, Pg. 100). The science world had finally found a way to overcome the expense and strenuous procedures to obtain cell subjects, scientist could test the effect of gravity, the pressure of deep sea diving by spinning the cells in a centrifuge (Skloot,

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Henrietta Lacks, also known as HeLa, is the woman with the immortal cells. Those famous cells eventually would lead to breakthroughs in studies about leukemia, influenza, Parkinson's disease, etc. However, the other side of the story is hardly known. Rebecca Skloot and Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s daughter, work together to find the unethical methods in which the Lacks family was treated.

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