Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
While reading the book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, I had so many emotions running through my mind. I would often think, what if that was my family or me? It is also very different because of the years this happened in. there were a lot of unlawful things going on that should have been against the law but were not at the time. Henrietta, as I read was an amazing woman who has a harsh life and also after she lost her life, it continued to be difficult. Henrietta kept her cancer from her family for some time and as stated in the book it was common for people to keep secrets about medical conditions (Skloot). I think Lacks is am amazing woman, not only for what she unknowingly did for the future of medicine but also as a mother and wife. She was such a strong woman and her legacy carry on and she story will be told all over.
Back in the day research was done on people without them knowing just like what was done to Henrietta, but not to the same extent. Although before Lacks, as stated in the book, cells were pulled from other people but did not survive and thrive like Lacks cells did. I knew before I read the book about research being done on African Americans for syphilis research with some of them knowing and some of them clueless as to what was going on (Skloot). They were all men who initially did not sign consent and this study ended up lasting 40 years (Centers for Disease and Control Prevention). I unfortunately had never heard of Henrietta Lack prior to reading this book and that worries me. I cant believe I had never heard about Henrietta Lacks or the HeLa cells, when she has such an important role in our modern medicine and vaccines. Henrietta is one of the main reasons we ha...
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...et the negative feedback from it. In my opinion they just didn’t want to deal with people knowing what they truly had done and didn’t want people to get emotional to the fact that those cells are from a real person and there is evidence of it.
As I looked up recent articles about the HeLa cells I find that her cells still exist today and are being used for genome sequencing (Nature.com). Doctors are using the same cells from over 50 years ago to better our medicine and medical advances. I wonder what Henrietta thinks of all this. It is an amazing thing in the long run because of what we discovered, but it is truly a terrible thing because it was done without consent and she had no choice. This also caused a lot of pain for her family and if only this could have been done on someone who consented and agreed, maybe it would not be such a negative event in history.
All I can say is amazing information of your glorious and late Henrietta Lacks. This incedible women bettered our society in ways no common human could understand at the time because of how complex this matter was and still very much indeed is. I know there is much contraversy with the matter of how scientists achived immortal cells from your late relative, and I do strongly agree with the fact that it was wrong for these researches to take advantage of this incredible women, but I know it is not for me to say nonethless it must be said that even though it was wrong to take Lacks’ cells when she was dying sometimes one must suffer to bring joy to the entire world.
Although it may seem impossible that the human who spawned this cell line would go unrecognized, this was exactly the case with Henrietta Lacks. In fact, her name was purposely altered in many publications to Helen Lake, Helen Lane or some variation of the sort, in order to hide her identity. As crazy as it may seem, Even Henrietta 's ' own family were unaware that the cells were taken from her and were being used in labs across the globe. The purposeful alteration of the name Henrietta Lacks is a sort of symbolic violence; a symptom of the structural violence which led Henrietta to Johns Hopkins hospital in the first place. By altering her name, and referring to her cell line as "HeLa," the scientific community effectively reduced the memory and image of Henrietta to something less than human. Scientists began to think of HeLa as something which was only a cell line, not as cells which had once been attached to a human being, with a life of her
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of Henrietta Lacks. In the early 1951 Henrietta discovered a hard lump on the left of the entrance of her cervix, after having unexpected vaginal bleeding. She visited the Johns Hopkins hospital in East Baltimore, which was the only hospital in their area where black patients were treated. The gynecologist, Howard Jones, indeed discovers a tumor on her cervix, which he takes a biopsy off to sent it to the lab for diagnosis. In February 1951 Henrietta was called by Dr. Jones to tell about the biopsy results: “Epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, Stage I”, in other words, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Before her first radium treatment, surgeon dr. Wharton removed a sample of her cervix tumor and a sample of her healthy cervix tissue and gave this tissue to dr. George Gey, who had been trying to grow cells in his lab for years. In the meantime that Henrietta was recovering from her first treatment with radium, her cells were growing in George Gey’s lab. This all happened without the permission and the informing of Henrietta Lacks. The cells started growing in a unbelievable fast way, they doubled every 24 hours, Henrietta’s cells didn’t seem to stop growing. Henrietta’s cancer cell grew twenty times as fast as her normal healthy cells, which eventually also died a couple of days after they started growing. The first immortal human cells were grown, which was a big breakthrough in science. The HeLa cells were spread throughout the scientific world. They were used for major breakthroughs in science, for example the developing of the polio vaccine. The HeLa-cells caused a revolution in the scientific world, while Henrietta Lacks, who died Octob...
The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks is a book about the women behind the scientific revolution of using actual cancer cells to perform cancer research. Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman who was barely educated and worked as a tobacco farmer. At the age of thirty she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. In Lacks’ time being uneducated, African American, and a woman was not a great mix. They were often undermined and taken advantage of. When Lacks started to become very ill she went to the nearest hospital that would accept black patients. There the doctor, George Gey, misdiagnosed her illness and took a tissue sample without her consent. After suffering through her illness and trying to keep up with her five children Henrietta died
Imagine that you were Douglas Mawson, along with two other explorers exploring unknown Antarctica, when everything goes wrong. Douglas Mawson suffered more adversity than Henrietta Lacks and Phineas Gage. Henrietta Lacks is about a woman who died from cervical cancer and her cells were extracted; later to find that her cells were immortal. Phineas Gage was a normal man when an extraordinary thing happened—he had a iron rod go through his skull. Phineas gage didn’t go through as much hardship, but he did go through more than Lacks. Half way through Mawson’s journey, both of his partners died, and it was just him, all alone in Antarctica. So, as anyone could see, Mawson experiences the most adversity among the three figures for many reasons.
Henrietta Lacks is not a common household name, yet in the scientific and medical world it has become one of the most important and talked names of the century. Up until the time that this book was written, very few people knew of Henrietta Lacks and how her cells contributed to modern science, but Rebecca Skloot aimed to change this. Eventually Skloot was able to reach Henrietta’s remaining family and through them she was able to tell the story of not only the importance of the HeLa cells but also Henrietta’s life.
People trust doctors to save lives. Everyday millions of Americans swallow pills prescribed by doctors to alleviate painful symptoms of conditions they may have. Others entrust their lives to doctors, with full trust that the doctors have the patient’s best interests in mind. In cases such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the Crownsville Hospital of the Negro Insane, and Joseph Mengele’s Research, doctors did not take care of the patients but instead focused on their self-interest. Rebecca Skloot, in her contemporary nonfiction novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, uses logos to reveal corruption in the medical field in order to protect individuals in the future.
Most people live in capitalist societies where money matters a lot. Essentially, ownership is also of significance since it decides to whom the money goes. In present days, human tissues matter in the scientific field. Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, shows how Henrietta Lacks’s cells have been used well, and at the same time, how they have been a hot potato in science because of the problem of the ownership. This engages readers to try to answer the question, “Should legal ownership have to be given to people?” For that answer, yes. People should be given the rights to ownership over their tissues for patients to decide if they are willing to donate their tissues or not. Reasons will be explained as follows.
“Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art,” said Josef Mengele, comparing science to an art. He was less of an artist and more of a curious, debatably crazy, doctor. He was a scientist in Nazi Germany. In general, there was a history of injustice in the world targeting a certain race. When Mengele was around, there were very few medical regulations, so no consent had to be given for doctors to take patients’ cells and other tests done on the patients’ bodies without their consent. This was the same time that Henrietta Lacks lived. Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman who went to the doctor because she had cervical cancer. Her cells were taken and are still alive in culture today (Skloot 41). Hence, her cells were nicknamed Immortal (Skloot 41). Although many, at the time, saw no issue with using a patient without consent issue with what?, on numerous occasions since then courts have determined that having consent is necessary for taking any cells. The story of Henrietta lacks is has similarities to an episode of Law and Order titled Immortal, which is an ethical conundrum. Despite this, the shows are not exactly the same and show differences between them. Both of these stories, one supposedly fictional, can also be compared to the injustices performed by Josef Mengele in Nazi Germany.
Henrietta Lacks was born on August 18, 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia. She stayed with her grandfather who also took care of her other cousins, one in particular whose name is David (Day) Lacks. As Henrietta grew up, she lived with both her Grandpa Tommy and Day and worked on his farm. Considering how Henrietta and Day were together from their childhood, it was no surprise that they started having kids and soon enough got married. As the years continued, Henrietta noticed that she kept feeling like there was a lump in her womb/cervix and discovered that there was a lump in her cervix. Soon enough, Henrietta went to Johns Hopkins Medical Center to get this check and learned that she had cervical cancer. But here is where the problem arises, Henrietta gave full consent for her cancer treatment at Hopkins, but she never gave consent for the extraction and use of her cells. During her first treatment TeLinde, the doctor treating Henrietta, removed 2 sample tissues: one from her tumor and one from healthy cervical tissue, and then proceeded to treat Henrietta, all the while no one knowing that Hopkins had obtained tissue samples from Henrietta without her consent. These samples were later handed to ...
The credibility and trustworthiness of a person can be achieved through their achievements and titles. Writers have the ability of achieving this by appealing to the rhetorical strategy ethos. Rebecca Skloot’s inclusion of her knowledge in science to provide her credibility and numerous information of all her characters in the novel helps develop the rhetorical strategy of ethos. Skoot’s implementation of appealing to ethos aids in emphasizing on the credibility of both herself and all the other characters in the novel. She demonstrates this rhetorical strategy by indicating titles and achievements her characters in the novel. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot develops the rhetorical strategy of ethos through the use of her characters in the novel consisting of Skloot herself, George Gey, and the virologist Chester Southam.
In the novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the author, Rebecca Skloot, tries to convince the audience that her argument regarding, Henrietta and her cells is worth thinking about. Skloot argues that the woman whose body contained these life-changing cells deserved to be recognized. While trying to prove her side of the argument, Skloot uses logos within the novel to emphasize to the audience just how important her cells are, by providing the science behind the cells and their accomplishments.
In 1951, the sickness of a poor African American woman named Henrietta Lacks -also know as HeLa- would go on to change the face of scientific research; without her consent. Henrietta Lacks went into John Hopkins Hospital in hopes of medical treatment, but instead her cells were unlawfully stolen from her and used for scientific advances in the world of medicine for the creations of the polio vaccine, cell cloning, vitro fertilization, and gene mapping. Long after Henrietta's death, Henrietta's family was forced to live a life of poverty without medical insurance simply because they could not afford it although their mothers cells had yielded billions of dollars due to its advances in the medical world. The scientific community and the media
Rebecca Skloot’s novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, depicts the violation of medical ethics from the patient and researcher perspectives specifically when race, poverty, and lack of medical education are factors. The novel takes place in the southern United States in 1951. Henrietta Lacks is born in a poor rural town, Clover, but eventually moves to urban Turner Station. She was diagnosed and treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins hospital where cells was unknowingly taken from her and used for scientific research. Rebecca Skloot describes this when she writes, “But first—though no one had told Henrietta that TeLinde was collecting sample or asked she wanted to be a donor—Wharton picked up a sharp knife and shaved two dime-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta's cervix: one from her tumor, and one from the healthy cervical tissue nearby. Then he placed the samples in a glass dish” (33). The simple act of taking cells, which the physicians did not even think twice about, caused decades
..., the name of Henrietta Lacks needs to be introduced to the world since she is the woman who generated HeLa cells, because the name of the person who generated HeLa cells is still unknown. By doing this, her family will be honored and respected by others.