The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

The book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” written by Rebecca Skloot revolves around an African American woman who began life as a poor tobacco farmer, but soon after being diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951 would unknowingly become one of the most important people in history. Unfortunately many would come to simply know her as “HeLa” the first “immortal” human cell line instead of another human being who had the right to know what doctors would soon do to her. She was strong woman and great mother to five unique children; Elsie, Lawrence, David (Sonny), Deborah, and finally Zakariyya (born Joe). The story itself tends to transition between the past and the present day. It gives us the story from both the perspective of Henrietta’s

After a year of sensing that something wasn't right Henrietta made the decision to get the “knob in her womb” as she would describe it checked out at John Hopkins Hospital; One of the top hospitals and at the time one of the only that would attend patients of color. She lived during a time where people could show at white-only hospitals only to be rejected and left to die. During her first visit no clear diagnosis had been made that day but one thing was clear, Henrietta was going to be a patient like no other. A couple days the results from her biopsy came back. Henrietta had a stage 1 Epidermoid Carcinoma of the Cervix. Around the time that she was coming into hospital Dr Howard W. Jones and his boss Richard Wesley TeLinde has been debating what they could classify as cervical cancer and what was the best method to treat it. Richard Wesley TeLinde was a top cervicales cancer expert who had many accomplishments to his name. One of them including pioneering the use of estrogen for treating symptoms of menopause. TeLinde like many others would use their patients for research, typically without informing them. People like him believed that since

They would lead to the creation to the first for-profit cell distribution center which would become a multibillion dollar industry. Henrietta's cells had caught the attention of many to the point where that's all many people were focused on. This frustrated Gey because he thought that there was much more people could experiment with, but he was more frustrated by the fact that now the industry he helped to create was beyond his control. Years later George Gey would die of pancreatic