On January 29, 1951, Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer at
On January 29, 1951, Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer at
In the early 1900’s, African Americans were faced with Jim Crow laws that created racial segregation in the United States, specifically the southern states. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, the protagonist, Henrietta was deprived of equal medical, legal, and educational services. The new historicism theory illustrates how African Americans were not given equal opportunities to medical attention, legal action and educational services needed as a result of Jim Crow laws. Henrietta is not given proper medical treatment because Jim Crow laws prevent her from receiving the treatment she needs. Henrietta noticed that she was unwell, and sought out her friends before seeking professional treatment, “‘I got a knot on…
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Elie Wiesel is quoted saying, “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.” The story of Henrietta Lacks, or “HeLa” as she is most commonly known, is a story of how one woman changed history so much and yet she has very little recognition. The reason Henrietta Lacks is not a household name is because the mainstream media and the scientific community overall does not know the person behind the cells, they only know what her cells have done to benefit them. Elie Wiesel mentions in the first part of his quote, “We must not see any person as…
The Secret Life of Henrietta Lacks was a book written by Rebecca Skloot in 2010. I had never heard of this book before I started to take Medically Terminology 1 and my teacher told us that we would be reading it over the course of the semester. I was very surprised that I had never heard of it before considering I work in a library. I enjoy reading books…
I can’t say that I fully agree with Sandy ro Grace, but I would have to side more with Sandy. We have to respect individuals rights to privacy and should strive to achieve informed consent. My wife read a book called the incredible Henrietta Lacks.…
The novel “The Life of Henrietta Lacks” raises many controversies between ethics and science due to the fact that ethics was not yet a crucial role in science. Scientists have been experimenting on Henrietta’s cells (HeLa) cells for decades, and even now the cells are being used in labs. Since the HeLa cells divide indefinitely, scientists can study and analyze them without running out of supplies. Over the years, these cells have greatly contributed to science, but more specifically, the vaccine for polio. Polio is an infectious disease caused by a virus that claimed thousands of lives worldwide.…
A person’s perspective is a key factor in their personality. If a politician has an early 1900’s racist mindset then the public knows they’ll attempt to limit the right of non-whites. If a male employer has a deeply rooted sexist mindset than it can be inferred that he would never employ women. These are all simple decisions that if implemented could have long lasting effects on a community, but what if someone’s perspective leads to a decision whose repercussions will literally last for an eternity. Such is the case with Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cell controversy, in which a group of scientists at John Hopkins University extracted cells from a young black woman named Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge and sold them to other scientists…
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Ethical Book Critique Andrea Burroughs University of Alabama at Birmingham Introduction The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was written by Rebecca Skloot who is from Springfield, Illinois. She is an award winning science writer. She first became familiar with the name Henrietta Lacks and HeLa in her college biology class. She was so intrigued with the information her professor Dr. Defler provided that she immediately went home to research more about this and searched the topic “cell culture” in her biology textbook index.…
Victimized by the exploitation of white scientists, Henrietta Lacks’ cancerous cells were taken without her consent as she sat in John Hopkins Hospital, the very place that would mark her death. These cells would eventually revolutionize the field of medicine and save millions of lives, but they also killed Henrietta, leaving her family behind in poverty and absolute turmoil. Throughout The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot most effectively appeals to her readers through the use of pathos, which causes them to become emotionally invested in the story behind Henrietta Lacks, the woman who changed the world of medicine without knowledge of doing so, whereas ethos and logos grant her credibility and defend her argument with reliable…
The book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” dives into the story of an African-American woman who was diagnosed with cervical cancer and died at a young age shortly after, leaving behind 5 children, a husband, and many cousins. When Henrietta was at John Hopkins being treated for her cancer, the doctors took a sliver of her tumor and cultured it to see if they could make the cell “immortal”. This all happened back in the 50’s when colored people weren’t seen as equal citizens to white people. Because of this, doctors withheld a lot of information, and they took the sliver from her without her consent and supposedly never told her about it. (Although there was one colleague who claimed that Gey did in fact tell Henrietta about the cells,…
Does the name Henrietta Lacks ring a bell? To most people not a single individual comes to mind and the fact that she helped change science and medicine forever remains unknown. Rebecca Skloot wanted to spread public awareness of this woman; the woman who’s cells were stolen from her without permission and grown immortally still to this day. A typical young adult that recently graduated college uses their money for paying off classes and selfishly for themselves, but this was not the case for Skloot. She used her student loans and credit cards, piling herself into debt, to research a poor African American family about their mother in order to reveal their story to the world.…
of a place. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a book that takes place during a time in which colored people had to sit in a different section at the movies. So, considering that the doctors took Henrietta’s cells without her permission made sense. Another way that everything in this book seems true is that Henrietta did not go to the hospital until the last moment. Johns Hopkins was the hospital that Henrietta decided to go to, and it was segregated as well.…
In Rebecca Skloot’s book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the author reveals a real-life story about the life of Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman who was diagnosed with a fast-growing cervical cancer at a very young age. The cells retrieved from her cervical tumor, later termed “HeLa”, became the first immortal cell that could survive in the lab and replicate continuously without dying. These cells later became key components to the development of many groundbreaking inventions such as the polio vaccine and in vitro fertilization. The purpose of this paper is to examine the social covenant of nursing in relation to the ethical dilemmas.…
Lacks was the perfect defenseless target because she simply did not understand what was occurring therefore she could not question what the doctors were doing to her. Ultimately Henrietta died from cervix cancer, however her cells that were taken from her did not die. They became known as HeLa cells and earned doctors billions of dollars without her family even aware that she was such an important person in science. After Henrietta Lacks died, doctors began to narrow in on her family to discover more about HeLa…
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the story of a lower class, poor tobacco farmer, Henrietta Lacks who unknowingly has helped millions of people, after her death. Henrietta Lacks had discovered that a small “knot” in her stomach area, was actually cervical cancer, but the novel does not focus on her cancer, rather it focuses on her life, death, the issues her family faced with the medical field, and how her cells have saved the lives of millions of people. This novel is split into three individual sections, Life, Death, and Immortality, which all cover different aspects of Henrietta’s story. The first and second parts of this novel, Life and Death, are pretty similar to the novels and stories that we have read in class, especially Beloved.…
On February 8th of 1951, the immortality of HeLa cells was discovered. Such breakthrough caused an outburst in scientific development and the release of ways to cure millions of diseases, including, but not limited to, polio, cancer, leukemia, and hemophilia. Following this further, Rebecca Skloot is able to describe the person behind the HeLa cells and the interminable process that she had to go through in order to attain enough information to write about Henrietta Lacks and her immortal cells. Skloot’s utilization of rhetorical strategies – the use of ethos, logos, and pathos – effectively engages and retains the reader in the life experience of not only Henrietta and her surroundings, but also in Skloot’s research journey on the lookout for unpublicized but highly valuable information. Skloot strived on finding and publicizing Henrietta Lacks’ life story, including those small details that not even her children had heard of before.…