In chapter 35, Rebecca and Deborah travel to Clover. Deborah in the middle of an allergy attack insists on Rebecca taking pictures in front of places with a picture of Elsie. She even stops and takes a picture with Elsie where she assumes her mother's grave is saying it will be the only picture in the world of all three of us together. They visit Gladys and her son Gary, and Deborah explains that she know realizes that though her time with her mother was short, she had a mother. And know she knows so much about her and her sister. Deborah begins to explain all the things her mother has done for science but is only making her allergic reaction worse. She paces the room and can not sit still. Out loud you can see she is trying to process all the information she has learned about her mother and sister. Gary performs a little prayer circle to have the Lord lift the burden Deborah is feeling from all this new information. After Gary squeezes her to no end, they leave to get a soul cleanse.
In chapter 36, Rebecca returns to Clover to speak with Gary. Rebecca explains that a part of a song sung yesterday is stuck in her head. Gary tells her that its the Lord's way of telling her something. He gives her a bible asking her to read a section out loud. Gary explains that like the passage states Henrietta was chosen to do the Lord's work and that is why she lives on. He believes that HeLa cells are Henrietta's spiritual body. Rebecca now understands how the Lacks family believes that Henrietta is alive in the cells. Their proof is found in between those pages. To them the Bible is their answer to why she still “lives”. In chapter 37, Deborah escapes death because it seems that her reaction was stress that almost lead her to a stroke. Debor...
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...those parents who brag about their kids til the cows come home for doing the simplest things. Their kid is like every other kid just like Henrietta is like every other person. She could have been an amazing person but I don't know her. Rebecca did not know here. The only thing that remains is her cells which don't seem to be giving us any insight on whether or not she had a good sense of humor or if she was nice. Hopefully class discussion will enlighten me because I'm not seeing it. I understand her cells did something for science and that's amazing. But her cells are just objects being tested on, the scientist who cured this, or created vaccines for that and other breakthroughs should be recognized. Yes without her the breakthroughs might not have happened. But there were breakthroughs before her time and even without HeLa I'm sure science would have continued.
Primarily, while Vivian does not truly come out and state if she is religious or not, she makes supply hints though out the play that she may not be religious and she truly fears the unknown journey of death. Numerous critics may argue that Vivian’s real struggle is against the cancer, nevertheless instead her real struggle is against what her past student Jason, calls the theme of “salvation anxiety” in the poetry of John Donne. Vivian’s anxiety resides precisely with the relationship, or God, that might finally carry her past death and into eternal life.
In the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, the author highlights the scientific advances of HeLa cells, as well as the personal setbacks of Henrietta Lacks’ family. HeLa is a commonly used cell line in laboratories worldwide and is so often referred to as “the cell line that changed modern science”. This line of immortal cells has helped advance science in ways beyond compare. HeLa has allowed cell testing, cell cloning, and the discovery of various vaccines, including the HPV vaccine. While HeLa has done wonders in the medical field, it has caused unrepairable damage among the Lacks family.
...and the great scientific achievements that followed were very interesting to me and very well written by Rebecca Skloot. But what made it all so real for me, was the personal story of Henrietta and her family. The frustration of the family and the lack of information that was given by the scientists really made me angry. These people suffered from so much injustice, why did no one made a small effort to explain it to them all? Reading about the health problems The story of the Lackes really visualizes the problems in science before, and the need to resolve them. In the end, the most important lesson learnt is that human tissue used for research shouldn’t be used in such a materialistic way, but it should be handled with in a respectful and ethical way.
The author of the book titled "The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks" was the only person to truly pay homage to Henrietta and her family. Rebecca Skloot took the perspective that Henrietta and her family were real life humans and she never strayed away from that. Rebecca went through extensive measures to travel and get the research found in her book correct, while telling an accurate and vivid account of Henrietta's life. Rebecca Skloot was the only person to see beyond the abstraction of Henrietta and be a big help to Henrietta's family. Rebecca
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.
Henrietta Lacks’ story is disturbingly similar to that of the Law and Order episode, Immortal. Particularly, they both share the same basic premise. In Rebecca Skloot’s account of Henrietta’s life, she explains. “. . . though no one had told Henrietta that TeLinde was collecting samples or asked if she wanted to be a donor, [Dr. Lawrence Wharton, Jr.] picked up a sharp knife and shaved two dime-sized pieces of ...
The first of four views in the book is Henrietta’s life and family. Henrietta was a black woman born August 1, 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia. She had her first child when she was 14 with her cousin Day. She then has a baby girl and then married when she was 18 on April 10, 1941. It all started after Henrietta’s fifth child was born when Henrietta said that she felt a knot inside of her womb. Her friends said it was just her baby, but Henrietta knew it wasn’t. She decided to go to the hospital and had a biopsy taken of a lump the size of a nickel in her cervix. She ended up being right; finding out that she had cervical cancer. Back then radium was used to treat cancer so they put a radium tube in and sent her home. While all of this was going on, Henrietta took her mentally challenged daughter to a mental institute hoping she’ll have a better life with more care. Henrietta then started receiving spot radiation treatments to try to get rid of the cancer. Her skin started to char af...
Rebecca Skloot begins The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks with a quote from Elie Wiesel:
She is struggling to have children that stay full of life unlike her neighbors; “Let God blame me, not you, not you, Rebecca! I’ll not have you judging me anymore!” (39). She questions why many neighbors have been able to conceive many healthy children, yet she can only have one. God supposedly leads Goody Putnam to believe he is only trying to punish her. Within Goody Putnam’s several attempts to have a child, her desire to have a child becomes more prominent. She finds it comforting to think about how the supernatural have to do with her unborn children. Considering witchcraft covers the town of Salem, this is easier for her to grasp. She is very envious of the mothers throughout the town and especially Rebecca who has eleven
Imagine having a part of your body taken from you without your permission, and then having those cells that are a part of your body grow and are being processed in labs around the world and then ultimately being used for the highest of research. That is what happens to Henrietta Lacks. In the book, The Immoral Life of Henrietta Lacks, we see Henrietta Lacks and her families story unravel, the numerous hardships that they faced, and the shocking revelation that their relative cells were being used for research without her consent and theirs.
Though her cells made many advancements in medicine, simply informing the family would have been the respectable and responsible thing for the doctor to do. The statement that Henrietta beat science was made and at first I had no idea what was meant by this. Her cells had multiplied by 400 times her body weight after the cells were taken and stored. The cell biologists had no idea how or why. The more time that was spent studying these cells, the more questions that arose in the quest to find the cure for cancer, the greatest in medicine were being defeated by the cells of an African American woman. Therefore, when the statement is made that Henrietta beat science, I take it as her condition and cells were so complex that even the greatest minds could not figure out why they did what they did. She still contributed to many other solutions that could save millions and billions of
In “Part 1: Life” of “The immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot, she starts telling us the life of Henrietta, where she grew, that she married Day, and everything she went trough with her cancer. But, more than that, Skloot is trying to show us the ethical, social, and health issues black people had back in those days, and also she wants to let us know how lucky we are to live in this period where we have a lot of opportunities, racism is not a strong movement but still affects the society a little, and of course give thanks to the advances of the medical and science world most of it because of the HeLa cells.
...arch and practices introduced in the book. She brings a sense of clarity for the readers to understand the back-to-back diverse situations she implements. Skloot describes what the family was put through in both not knowing and finding out about Henrietta’s cells, as well as describing the reactions the family had to the situation. She gains credibility by telling about the family’s history involving the different places she visited such as Clover, Virginia where Henrietta was raised, the home-house in which she grew up in, as well as the unmarked grave in which her body lies beneath.
This section is used to demonstrate to the reader the enormous effects of her death to both her family and science. Immediately following Henrietta's death, Dr. Gey is anxious to take as many samples from her body as possible. However, he must first obtain permission from her husband for an autopsy. Henrietta's husband, Day, is tricked into giving permission. He is told the autopsy will provide test results that may help his children in the future. During the autopsy, Gey's assistant Mary Kubicek takes notice to Henrietta's painted toenails and realizes that HeLa cells belong to an actual person. She says, "they came from a live woman" (Skloot 91). A few days after the autopsy, Henrietta's body is sent from Baltimore to Clover. Henrietta is buried a few days later in an unmarked grave alongside her mother in Lacks Town. Her death is swift and little mourning is conducted by the family. By placing this section second, the reader gains insight into Henrietta's family. Her children are treated poorly and her husband is absent most of the time following her death. This section is important in understanding and gaining insight into the people closest to
Doctors often would not inform their patients of everything they were doing to them and they did most things without a patient’s consent. In the book, Henrietta was not aware of many of the things the doctors were doing to her. They took samples of her tumor without her knowledge. The treatments that were given to her had negative side effects that she was not made aware of. The doctors’ and researchers’ actions had similar effects on Henrietta’s family. The family was never aware that her cells were being used in laboratories or that researchers were making millions of dollars off of them. Even when the Lackses were made aware of the research being conducted on the cells, it caused the family a great deal of confusion and distress. When they finally found out about the HeLa cells, it was because a doctor wanted to take their blood to test for genetic markers. The doctors did not explain this to the poorly educated Lackses, who thought they were being tested for cancer. This miscommunication caused Henrietta’s family to panic, for they thought they were going to die just like Henrietta. On the other hand, on the national level, HeLa cells served as a platform for research about many diseases, including cancer and polio. The cells progressed the scientific research on genetics and diseases further than ever thought