Rebecca West

Henrietta Lacks at the age of 31 died of cervical cancer; however, scientists across the world were using her tissue for medical advancement sixty-two years later. The problem is neither Henrietta Lacks or the family after she passed gave consent to these studies that occurred for years. The HeLa genome provided many discoveries in the fields of cancer, vaccines, viruses, and cells in general. Henrietta Lacks and her family did not have the rights to potential earnings from these discoveries…

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lack who was an African American women born in 1920 the eighth of ten children. Her mother died when she was the age of four and her father her and the rest of her siblings went to live with her father in Virginia. From there the children were distributed to several relatives as it was too much of a burden for one person to handle ten children. Henrietta lived with Tommy Lacks, her grandfather. They grew up poor…

Poverty played a huge role in the Lacks family. Due to poverty, the majority of the Lacks family was uneducated, so for many years, the family was unable to take justice upon the people who decided to take Henrietta's cells without permission and turning it into a profitable business; since they knew very little about what was actually going on and what the HeLa cells meant for the rest of the world. Further expanding on the idea that since Henrietta's family was not educated enough due to…

Henrietta Lack’s cells have a long and rich history that span the study of genetics. She has been a part of thousands of research projects with the hope that her cells can make a difference. One project that has used her cells in its work is the Human Genome Project. This multinational, government driven idea wanted to discover the inner-workings of the human body and how humans differ from each other by sequencing the human genome. The genome is the “instruction manual” that is “written” in the…

Accomplished journalism scientist, Rebecca Skloot tells the story about Henreitta Lacks, known as HeLa, “a poor black tobacco farmer who’s cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951,” writes Skloot in the prologue of her book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. “I first learned about HeLa cells and the woman behind them in 1988, thirty-seven years after her death, when I was sixteen and sitting in a community college biology class. My instructor, Donald Defler, a gnomish balding man,…

Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman born on August 1, 1920 in Southern Virginia. She is best known as the woman with the immortal cells. She was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer in 1951 at John Hopkins University by Dr. George Gey. She died in 1951 at the age of 31. During her cervical-cancer biopsy Dr. Gey snipped samples from her tissue without the consent of the patient to run studies on the cells that were grown from the tumor. That is how Henrietta Lacks made one of the…

1. HeLa cells are a type of immortal cell derived from the cervical cancer of Henrietta Lacks. These were the first type of human cell that were found to not die in a lab culture and have been used in creating many different vaccines. Theses cell are still used all around the world in the development of vaccines and in other type of research such such as HIV and AIDS. HeLa cells also have become surround by controversy for the fact that they were first taken from Lacks and used in lab…

Throughout chapter 27 the readers gain more of an understanding of the science behind Henrietta's cells. Most importantly there was the discovery of the sexually transmitted disease called Human Papillomavirus (HPV). What HPV does is turn of a gene that is a tumor suppressor and the HeLa cells tested positive for this HPV virus. While this discovery provided some light on the mystery of Henritta's cause of cancer, it still could not lead to any clues on the uniqueness of Henrietta’s cells. Her…

reading the book then just would not care about it at all. If this book was published during 1951, it may possibly affect things. It might have stopped Jim Crow Laws, segregation, discrimination. They could try to do some research to figure out what Rebecca Skloot is saying. Henrietta’s family could have gain some money from the HeLa cells. Therefore, they might have been able to live better. However, I still think that the book would not have affected anything in that time period. Why would…

HeLa cells, and the issues raised by their use are the subject of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot”. Not many people knew about Henrietta as a person or her story, most people knew her because of HeLa and her cells. Her kids were always having people talk to them about her cells, they never asked for her story they couldn’t trust a lot of people because of it, so when Rebecca asked her Henrietta’s story they were not very open to trusting her at…