Rebecca Skloot

In times of desperation, we are morally impulsive in our decision making that sometimes lead to misfortune among others. What’s best for the greater good, isn’t necessarily what’s best for the individual. This moral dilemma relates to the issues in the novel Dawn by Octavia Butler and an article written about Henrietta Lacks by Jessica L Stump . Circumstances when somatic rights are thrown aside isn’t acceptable without consent, however, in times of desperation, we often side in favour of the…

SAAD ALDAKHEEL 10/19/2017 American literature How Anne Bradstreet confronts puritan view of gender Anna Bradstreet grow up in a health family. She was the daughter of Thomas Dudley who is the manager of country estate of the puritan Earl of Lincoln. Anna Bradstreet got married at the age of 16 to the young Simon Bradstreet who was working with Anna father. Anna Bradstreet never went to school but her father always taught her and gave her an education. It that time many woman didn’t have an…

Beth, a stage 0 breast cancer survivor, says that chemo treatment was the worse thing that she has ever gone through. Having surgery or even doing radiation was nothing compared to the sickness that she had with chemo. Luckily, chemo isn’t the only solution. Now, there are treatments that are that are successful and keep the patient healthier. These treatments are called homeopathic or alternative treatments. Homeopathic cancer treatments are better than mainstream treatments because they are…

Similar to other discoveries, evidence shows that discovery of the DNA structure was marred by controversies. Part of this controversy involved Rosalind Elsie Franklin, an X-ray crystallographer who was working on DNA with Maurice Wilkins at King’s College in London, England, between 1950 and 1953 (Sayre, 1975). She then moved to Birbeck College in London, where she worked on tobacco mosaic and poliovirus until her tragic death from cancer in 1958 at the age of thirty-seven. Following the…

October 1951, Henrietta Lacks died. However, in death, she was transformed. Her cervical cancer cells, taken without her knowledge, would revolutionize the medical world by aiding in the development of gene mapping, cloning, and the polio vaccine (Skloot, 96). The method used by her Johns Hopkins doctors to gain access to her immortal cells was nothing short of unethical. Medical consent hardly existed in 1950, and doctors were able to take anything from patients they deemed valuable without…

Open Hearts: The Work of Daniel Hale Williams Germs don’t discriminate, why should hospitals? Daniel Hale Williams, quite possibly the most prominent black physician of his time, sought to answer this question. Best known for performing the first successful recorded heart surgery, Williams spent his life working for the advancement of African-Americans within the medical field. Williams was born in 1856 in the town of Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. A chance encounter with a barbershop customer…

Dr. Gey's use of Henrietta Lacks cervical tissue was unethical and disrespectful to the patient. His wicked nature stole her cells without consent used the cells to make some of the most astonishing research. This immortal act of Dr. Gey, was wrong, regardless of his curiosity. Even though, he was the head of tissue culture at John Hopkins and that was his main focus, taking her cells without permission and use them to make millions of dollars displayed an improper and unprofessional behavior.…

In 1951, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took cell samples from a cancer patient without her knowledge or permission. This woman, Henrietta Lacks, has been a controversial topic ever since. For years, Dr. George Gey had been trying to make human cells divide and multiply continuously, and when the cell sample that had been taken from Mrs. Lacks began to do just that, he was understandably ecstatic. Having a limitless supply of living human cells allowed doctors to test how human cells reacted…

Hopkins, had not been informed that samples from her cervix were collected, nor had she been asked if she was interested in being a donor (p. 33). HeLa cells made large contributions to science, but they have exclusively benefitted companies (p. 194). Skloot writes that had the Lacks family contacted a lawyer, they would have known that they could “sue on the grounds of privacy violation or lack of informed consent” (p. 198). John Hopkins misled Day when they asked permission for an autopsy,…

My role as a social worker would have been to help the family as much as I can get through the complications they faced. I would offer services like educating them about informed consent, provide crisis counseling, and I would try to get every member of the Lacks family the free health insurance they obviously deserve. Slavin who died 21years ago, has special cells like how Henrietta has special cells. Slavin cells produced extremely valuable proteins that were important for scientific research.…