Henrietta Lacks Families Website
The focus of my research paper is to inform readers whom Mrs. Lacks was and the injustice that happened with her and to prove she deserves recognition. In order to entirely grasp my topic one must know who Mrs.Lacks was. For this reason I’m using The Lacks Family’s official website that introduces her. This will help me introduce the topic in my research paper.
The source provides Mrs.Lacks background information to help lead the topic. Explains that she was a native of rural southern Virginia, and lived in, Maryland. She was admitted to the John Hopkins’s hospital due to abdominal pain and vaginal spotting. She soon died of cervical cancer in 1951. The source delves into the injustice that was done with Mrs.Lacks it says
Not all of Henrietta Lacks died that day. She unknowingly left behind a piece of her that still lives today—it’s called the HeLa cell. Her cells were taken and used for medical research without her consent. And for more than 20 years after her death Henrietta’s family would learn how science retrieved her cells and of her enormous contribution to medicine and to human life.
The website here shows that after she died her cells were studied for medical research and her family wasn’t aware of it until after twenty years. The cells were given the name HeLa cells as a bit of recognition to her by putting her first name Henrietta, and last name Lacks, together. The next part can help me prove that Mrs.Lacks deserves recognition for her contributions made and her family deserves some sort of profit because the source says, “Even though Henrietta’s cells launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, the family never saw any of the profits or that He...
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...lood” and that the shot was for “therapeutic”, healing the disease. However the spinal cap was actually for insight to infection linked to the brain. The source also says “The Tuskegee scientists wanted to continue to study how the disease spreads and kills. The experiment lasted four decades, until public health workers leaked the story to the media”. The quote corresponds to Mrs.Lacks because her family wasn’t aware and the men were clueless also with the experiment. The Lacks family and Rebecca Skloot who wrote the book about her made Mrs.Lacks story go viral and for the African American men the media with the help of health workers made the story go viral. The men were also given burial insurance for participating but the Lacks family can’t even afford health insurance or didn’t see any profit for Mrs.Lacks contribution to the medical and science world.
The book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is the result of years of research done by Skloot on an African American woman with cervical cancer named Henrietta Lacks. Cells from Lacks’ tumor are taken and experimented on without her knowledge. These cells, known as HeLa cells, are the first immortal human cells ever grown. The topic of HeLa cells is at the center of abundant controversial debates. Despite the fact that her cells are regarded as, “one of the most important advancements in the last hundred years” (4), little is actually known about the woman behind the cells. Skloot sets out on a mission to change this fact and share the story of the woman from whom the cells originate and her family as they deal with the effects these cells have on them.
An abstraction can be defined as something that only exists as an idea. People are considered abstractions when they are dehumanized, forgotten about, or segregated and discriminated against. The scientific community and the media treated Henrietta Lacks and her family as abstractions in several ways including; forgetting the person behind HeLa cells, giving sub-par health care compared to Caucasians, and not giving reparations to the Lacks family. On the other hand, Rebecca Skloot offers a different perspective that is shown throughout the book. Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks describes the trials and tribulations the Lacks family has gone through because of HeLa cells and shows how seeing a person as an abstraction is a dangerous thing.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by: Rebecca Skloot has a lot of themes, but one that is most relevant in my opinion is the racial politics of medicine. Throughout the chapters, there were examples of how Henrietta, being African American, prevented her from receiving the same treatment as the white woman sitting right next to her in the waiting room. The story begins with Henrietta going to Johns Hopkins Hospital and asking a physician to check a “knot on her womb.” Skloot describes that Henrietta had been having pain around that area for about a year, and talked about it with her family, but did not do anything until the pains got intolerable. The doctor near her house had checked if she had syphilis, but it came back negative, and he recommended her to go to John Hopkins, a known university hospital that was the only hospital in the area that would treat African American patients during the era of Jim Crow. It was a long commute, but they had no choice. Patient records detail some of her prior history and provide readers with background knowledge: Henrietta was one of ten siblings, having six or seven years of schooling, five children of her own, and a past of declining medical treatments. The odd thing was that she did not follow up on upcoming clinic visits. The tests discovered a purple lump on the cervix about the size of a nickel. Dr. Howard Jones took a sample around the tissue and sent it to the laboratory.
Henrietta Lacks, birthed Loretta Pleasant, was born on August 1, 1920 to poor African- American parents. Although she was native of Roanoke, Virginia, Henrietta spent the majority of her childhood in Clover, Virginia on the tobacco field with her grandfather and a host of cousins. As a result of the excessive “quality” time with her cousins Henrietta became attached to one in particular, David “Day” Lacks. He later fathered her first child. At the age of fourteen Henrietta conceived her first child, Lawrence Lacks. Unlike White mothers who birthed their children in hospitals; Henrietta birthed her child in her grandfather’s home-house, a four room cabin previously used as slave quarters. While White patients were certain to receive the upmost patient ca...
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...
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.
On the concept of feasibility, disputes regarding practicality make reparation impossible. The fundamental definition of “family” yields the question of deciding which members of the Lacks family should be eligible for remuneration. Would compensation conclude with Lacks’s immediate kin or expand to extended family? Her children Lawrence Lacks, Sonny Lacks, and Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman would undoubtedly receive restitution, but the passing of daughters Elsie Lacks and Deborah Lacks complicate the case for direct descendants. Hence, no just method exists to determine which relatives would qualify for restitutions. Additionally another hindrance to compensation arises: who should be held accountable for repaying the Lacks family? The default culprit Johns Hopkins merely freely distributed HeLa to other laboratories, never garnering any profit from the cells. Hundred of research institutions across the globe have received samples of HeLa; thus, tracking down each individual laboratory would be next to impossible. Even if that feat was feasible, what monetary value should be compensated? No single individual or organization has the authority to dictate an appropriate amount that can simultaneously satisfy both family and compensator as well as solve the ethical
Henrietta Lacks was a poor woman with middle school education have made the greatest medical contributions. Henrietta lacks had made one of the greatest medical contribution because her cells were growing and dividing rapidly. Henrietta Lacks cells were taken from a cervical-cancer biopsy. The HeLa cells (Henrietta Lacks cells) help accomplish amazing things in the medical fields. The HeLa cells had helped accomplish advancement in medicine. The Hela cells that were taken from her tumor when she was undergoing surgery have been accountable of the medical advances. The polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping and IVF were the advancement in medicine. These health breakthroughs were possible because of Henrietta Lacks. The scientists
Laying on a chilling silver surgery table, completely vulnerable. Not knowing that the surgeon, whom you trusted, is now taking important parts of your body to research on. You wake up to never know that because of your existence you've changed the face of science history forever. In a book written by Rebecca Skloot “The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks,” Skloot writes about the life of a African American woman and her cells that change the history of health and science, and this woman's name is Henrietta Lacks. Although Lacks was such an important impact in science history, Lacks and her family were never informed. Henrietta Lacks died in October 4, 1951, of cervical cancer and never knew about the amazing breakthrough that her body made in
Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman, was born Loretta Pleasant on August 1, 1920. No one knows at this time why she changed her name to Henrietta later in life. She was born in Roanoke Virginia. Her family was extremely poor and life was not easy for the Lacks family. After, Henrietta’s mothers died while giving birth to her tenth child, the family then moved to a tobacco farm in Clover, Virginia. The children were then disbursed throughout the family and Henrietta was sent to live with her grandfather, Tommy Lacks, on the farm, who was caring at the time for her older cousin David Day Lacks. At the age of fourteen she gave birth to her first of five children by her first cousin David Lacks. Education at that time was not a priority for the Lacks family. Henrietta only had a six grade education. Now that we have some basic background on Henrietta Lacks, let’s take a look at her diagnosis and death.
Miss. Evers Boys is a movie based on the real life study called “The Tuskegee Study” that took place in Macon County, Alabama, where 400 black men who had syphilis and 200 black men without this disease participated on this study without knowing the terrible truth behind it. Also the participants were poor and uneducated sharecropper who fell for Miss. Evers persuasions and rewards that doctors were offering to participants. The main results that doctors were trying to obtain from this experiment was to gain information about how African Americans men’s bodies reacted to syphilis. During the 1930’s, society believed that black men were inferior to white men, so diseases were supposed to affect differently black men. This study in particular, the participants were not informed about the capacity that this disease could damage their human system and they were not viewed as a human being and they were used as lab rat. Furthermore, one of the doctors who were involved in this experiment Dr. Raymond Vonderlehr used the term “necropsy” that is an autopsy performed on animals when speaking about the participants of this experiment (Mananda R-G, 2012).
Cell biology has made a huge upsurge to the advancement and face of public health. In the novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, cell biologists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland have researched Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cells to find a new life changing discovery: that her cells, other known as HeLa cells, would be everlasting and would replenish themselves and change the picture of medicine. Rebecca Skloot begins the compelling story of this scientific advancement of saving humanity from illness by analyzing the life of Henrietta. Throughout part one, life, Skloot reviews just how these cells were founded, how Henrietta’s life began and how Henrietta’s story continues to be told and researched today.
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
...ave. They have been through a lot by people asking over and over about the HeLa cells. I think the least the doctors could do is tell them the actual truth about how they used those cells and stop making them guess or always wonder. I think they should have told them when they come to get the blood what they were actually using it for. They may not have understood, but the least they could do is tell them. They could have told them they wasn’t taking their blood to see if they had cancer they should have told them they were taking it for the HeLa cells. I think it was a good thing when I found out that Gey was actually doing research on the cells and not actually trying to get money. I thought this whole time he was probably getting money from it. I think when he was doing his research he was actually trying to help people, not put the Lack’s family through so much.
The book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, was a nonfiction story about the life of Henrietta Lacks, who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Henrietta did not know that her doctor took a sample of her cancer cells a few months before she died. “Henrietta cells that called HeLa were the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory” (Skloot 22). In fact, the cells from her cervix are the most important advances in medical research. Rebecca was interested to write this story because she was anxious with the story of HeLa cells. When she was in biology class, her professor named Donald Defler gave a lecture about cells. Defler tells the story about Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells. However, the professor ended his lecture when he said that Henrietta Lacks was a black woman. In this book, Rebecca wants to tell the truth about the story of Henrietta Lacks during her medical process and the rights for Henrietta’s family after she died.