Summary: The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

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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 scientific community saw Henrietta as nothing but a test subject before and after her death. During her first cancer treatment, nurses lead Henrietta to the “colored ward” where, before performing the operation, surgeons “shaved two dime-sized pieces of tissue from [her] cervix,” without consent (33). From there, the scientists received those samples and “labeled each [test tube] … using the first two letters of the patient’s …show more content…

From the persistent phone calls phone calls explaining her intentions to the accurate portrayal that the family so desperately wanted for Henrietta. Skloot dismantles the idea that Henrietta and her family were nothing but abstractions that did not have a place in the media or scientific community and builds on the fact that HeLa cells once belonged to a human being. That human being was a beautiful woman with “... walnut eyes, straight white teeth, and full lips… She kept her nails short so bread dough wouldn’t stick under them when she kneaded it, but she always painted them a deep red to match her toenails.”

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