Essay On The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

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The novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is written by Rebecca Skloot. This novel provides a real story regarding research using human tissue without patient’s consent. It gives the background of Henrietta Lacks and the achievements HeLa cells established to point out how fallacious it is for doctors to take the cells without asking. Through the unique pattern and devices, Skloot expresses her sympathy for the right of consent of medical research.
This novel illustrates Skloot’s footsteps that uncover the truth behind Henrietta Lacks, whose cells are “immortal”, which launched a medical revolution. Skloot introduces her obsession with Henrietta Lacks by saying “I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering […] growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body” [Skloot 2]. As one of the chapters quotes, “Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia, on August 1, 1920.” [Skloot 18]. She went to Johns Hopkins Hospital claiming that she has a knot inside her womb, but the doctors did not take any action. After her son Joe was born, she goes to the hospital and starts radium treatment. The doctors start taking the cervical cancerous tissue without Henrietta’s knowledge, and surprisingly, the cells do not die in the culture dish as normal cells did. George Gey , the doctor that starts to send the “immortal” cells to his colleagues for the purpose of researching, creates the first immortalized human cell line that help save a large number of people’s lives. After the Lackses realize that Henrietta’s cells have been sold without their consent, they did not start taking actions because of their lack of knowledge. Skloot begins to be involved into the Lacks family members’ lives, especially Henriett...

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...use HeLa cells. As a result, Skloot draws vivid pictures for the detailed description to express her compassion toward the family.
Skloot creates the correct atmosphere to make the reader feel sympathy for the Lackses throughout this novel. For this novel’s validity, she incorporates different types of statistics, including newspaper articles, personal journal, documents, etc. as shown in the following passage, “the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, […] govern most tissue research” [Skloot 317]. Skloot also interviews Henrietta’s relatives, Johns Hopkins Hospital’s doctors, and other people that have knowledge of Henrietta Lacks that are necessary to write this novel. As the reader slowly reads through this novel, they would feel the sympathy. Therefore, this novel composes passion that Skloot wants to merge into the scientific world and reality.

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