Trial and Error

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Recommended: Determining decision making

In life, we are often faced with tasks where we as individuals are called to make decisions, to choose what is right and what is wrong. Making decisions has the possibility of changing your atmosphere, educationally, spiritually, physically, and psychologically. The ability to make decisions is a humanistic quality that expresses, choice, desire, and confidence. The process in which decisions are made happens one of two ways: by theory and logic, or by trial and error. Both are proven to aid in success, but one is more inspiring than the other. The process of trial and error is seen throughout Rebecca Schloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I will examine the decision making process of trial and error of the author, the doctors, and of the Lacks family. After reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I understand there can be success in trial and error, if you’re willing to endure the journey. “Learning doesn’t happen from failure itself but rather from analyzing the failure, making a change, and then trying again.” (Wikipedia.com)

The author, Rebecca Skloot is a true pioneer, in relaying the truth of the history of what really happened to Henrietta Lacks during and after her death. She was inspired after sitting in a college professor’s science course, where HeLa cells were being discussed. She had the desire to know, the background of what soon became the story she would tell. She was learning about these international, common knowledge cells, and yet when she asked whom they belonged too, minimal knowledge was known. The unknown is what challenged her to begin research, and the product is what “60 media outlets have called the best book of 2010.“(Rebeccaskloot.com)

It took Rebecca over a decade to com...

... middle of paper ...

...be the motivation for progressiveness. Trial and error was used amongst the author, the doctors, and the Lacks family, and in their own way each party gained much respective success. That is the charge that trial and error also give us, to understand that greater development and discoveries only come from challenges, and how we move through them. The greatest storytellers are those who live, to tell their own stories.

Works Cited

Skloot, Rebecca. "Rebecca Skloot Journalist, Teacher, Author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." Rebecca Skloot. Rebecca Skloot, 2010. Web. 25 Mar. 2012. .

Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown, 2010. Print.

"Trial and Error." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 21 Mar. 2012. Web. 25 Mar. 2012. .

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