Rebecca

of their origin and there would probably be more than sufficient to populate a village of Henriettas” (237). According to the quote above, the amount of cells from one woman’s body is compared to the population of one village. How could this be? Rebecca Skloot, the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, first started learning about HeLa cells in school, but was more curious to know the origin of the cells. Skloot was determined to find out more about the famous HeLa cells and where they…

Piecing Together a Fragmented Understanding of Henrietta Lacks In the foreword to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot discusses her efforts and struggles in attempting to capture and to present clearly the story and narrative of Henrietta Lacks. Skloot acknowledges in the Prologue that there is “no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta’s cells are alive today” (Skloot, 2). All of the numbers are estimates, guesses, or attempts, and the idea that there is no way of…

I've been reading the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. This book is about a black woman who died of a cervical cancer in 1951 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Doctors took a cell from her cervix without any consent of her or her family. Her cells are still alive today, growing and multiplying. After this event her family will never be the same. The family discovered it more than two decades later that part of Henrietta was still alive and has been…

Morality is defined by discerning right from wrong, which is something scientists who conducted human research were unable to do. In the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebecca Skloot, Henrietta Lacks is an African-American woman who developed an aggressive form of cervical cancer. Although she is treated for the cancer, the treatment is executed much later than if she had been a white woman. During her first operation to treat the cancer, the surgeon removed two pieces of…

This conveys to the reader the message that Rebecca Skloot is trying to send. The descriptive conversations between Rebecca and Deborah makes it possible to imagine how hard it was to process information on one 's mother. It was clear that Deborah was a strong woman, who took large measures with Rebecca Skloot to discover as much as possible about her mother. The scientific knowledge that Deborah and Rebecca gain from unearthing the past as well as the emotional pain that comes…

The developments of new genetic technologies will raise some of these ethical issues that will affect the person as well as the society as the whole. In 2010 ethical issues was emerge as big controversial problem within the scientific community by Rebecca Skloot, the publisher of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lack, a book on the He-La cells and why it was morally unethical. He-La, a cervix cells from a woman named Henrietta Lack’s, a code named that world known to the first immortal human…

Writers are constantly telling other people’s stories, arguably it is the best way to get inspiration. Using another person’s experience or history allows a point of view to come through that the author never would have had on their own. The way that this is done however dramatically changes with the style they prefer, therefore changing how it’s received. An author who makes the story their own may receive more backlash than someone who allows it to remain that of the teller. They also might…

died of cervical cancer during the first half of the twentieth century, led to dozens of groundbreaking medical discoveries. Despite this contribution, her family lives utterly destitute, her name forgotten by all but her most dedicated followers. Rebecca Skloot’s book attempts to correct this injustice, giving life to the woman many simply know as HeLa. Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks hammers the point home by using pathos to highlight the suffering of Henrietta, logos to detail…

tissue and cells from a deceased patient. Mary Kubicek removed tumor tissue from Henrietta at the request of Dr. Gey and the family had only given consent to perform an autopsy, not removal of the tissue. (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot). After receiving the cells from Dr. Jones, Dr. Gey named Henrietta’s cells “HeLa” in order to conceal the identity of the cells from her family as well as from the world, and claimed to receive the cells from a “Helen Lane”. Dr. Gey did…

cells became a groundbreaking discovery in medicine. Without the racism of 1950s south the world would not have a cure for polio. By removing the human aspect of the cells, the world was given a gift of maybe one day using Hela for a cure to all. Rebecca Skloot came up with concept for the book only after doing research of her own. Concluding…