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The immortal life of henrietta lacks introduction essay
Ethical and bioethical issues in medicine
How bioethics is concerned with human life
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In “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” Rebecca Skloot describes the life of an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks whose “immortal” cells changed both the field of science and her family’s lives forever. When Henrietta Lacks passed away due to cervical cancer at the young age of 31, her family accepted the fact that she was gone forever. However, little did they know that during her treatments, George Gey, a doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital, took a sample of Henrietta’s cells and named them HeLa in hopes of finding one that multiplied infinitely. Suddenly, worldwide factories began to grow HeLa and began selling them to scientists for testing. During this process, Henrietta’s husband and 5 children had absolutely no idea that Henrietta’s cells were still alive because few knew the actual name of the patient who HeLa came from. Eventually, they found out and were furious at Johns Hopkins and refused to speak to anyone who wanted information on Henrietta. Throughout the book, Rebecca Skloot struggles …show more content…
Bioethics is the use of morals in science. If there had been more bioethics in Henrietta Lacks’s case, her doctors may have used their morals to not take the cells from her body without her permission or at least let her family know they had. Sixteen years before her case, the Nuremberg Code had been created which stated 10 codes of ethics to be used during human experimentation. However, it was not a law and few doctors even knew it existed.The issue of informed consent was also brought up in 1957 but doctors testified it was unnecessary. However on June 30th, 1974,17 years later, a law was passed requiring informed consent for all federally funded research. The issue of bioethics affected HeLa and many began to doubt if the doctors at Johns Hopkins had really been ethical. In conclusion, Henrietta Lacks and her “immortal” cells helped the field of science and its future
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.
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.
Henrietta’s cells were being inaugurated with space travel, infused into rat cells, and even being used to make infertile hens fertile again. However, these are only a few of the many accomplishments that Henrietta’s immortal cells made possible: “The National Cancer Institute was using various cells, including HeLa, to screen more than thirty thousand chemicals and plant extracts, which would yield several of today’s most widely used and effective chemotherapy drugs, including Vincristine and Taxol,”(pg.139). This example of logos from the text again shows just how important these Henrietta’s cells were to the future developments in
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.
People trust doctors to save lives. Everyday millions of Americans swallow pills prescribed by doctors to alleviate painful symptoms of conditions they may have. Others entrust their lives to doctors, with full trust that the doctors have the patient’s best interests in mind. In cases such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the Crownsville Hospital of the Negro Insane, and Joseph Mengele’s Research, doctors did not take care of the patients but instead focused on their self-interest. Rebecca Skloot, in her contemporary nonfiction novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, uses logos to reveal corruption in the medical field in order to protect individuals in the future.
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
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.
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.
The use of Henrietta Lacks cells has led to many scientific breakthroughs, e.g., the cure to polio, cloning, and the human genome project. Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951. These cells underwent a mutation that caused them to become immortal, meaning that they continue to divide since her death in 1951 to this very day. However, her cells raise an ethical question, because before she died she did not give consent for scientists to use her cells and after she died they did not tell her family that they were using them. This has been an ongoing controversy because the cells have been so beneficial for society, but they are derived from shady procedures. The reason way Henrietta’s cells, HeLa cells, didn’t undergo apoptosis was that they were cancerous cells that replicated indefinitely and these cells were modified to be even more resistant due to other diseases Ms. Lacks had.
The novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by author Rebecca Skloot is about a black woman whose cells were used by doctors to study medicine without her knowledge or her permission. Rebecca Skloot first heard of Henrietta Lacks when she was 16-years-old in her college biology class. Her professor, Donald Defler, mentioned Henrietta briefly during his lesson about cells. Defler talked about how Henrietta’s cells helped scientists learn all they know about cell and cell culture today, and allowed them to develop disease-fighting drugs to combat herpes, leukemias, influenza, hemophilia and Parkinson’s disease. Although Defler did acknowledge the fact that it was Henrietta’s cells who helped change the future of medicine, all Defler added was that she was a black woman. Skloot was unsatisfied with this information and she wanted to know more about Henrietta Lacks, such as “Where was she from?... Did she know how important her cells were? Did she have any children?” (Skloot 4). The problem was, though, that no one cared to find out anything about the person whose cells were famous all over the world. Most people, in fact, did not even realize that her name was Henrietta Lacks, and not Helen Lane. All people knew about this woman was that her cancerous cells were referred to as HeLa cells. Thus, Skloot’s purpose was to inform people around the world about the life of the woman whose
In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot writes about one women’s journey to immortality. Through the telling of Henrietta’s —the immortal women’s—story, Skloot details some of the vast changes in biomedical research at this time: The HeLa cells —the first immortal human cells— attributed to many of these movements. With these cells, scientists were, and still are, making great strides in science. Namely, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and many treatment medications stemmed from the HeLa cell line (Skloot 21). And perhaps, most notably, scientists discovered a polio vaccine using the HeLa cells. However, aside from the growths in biomedical research, Skloot highlights the corners that many scientists cut for their research. For one thing, Henrietta was not informed about her contribution to science: Henrietta’s doctors were not required to ask for her permission. The same holds true for other doctors at this time, as well. For this reason, all doctors held a significant amount of power over their patients. In short, Skloot portrays biomedical research as a practice with the need for advancements, informed consents, and a power shifts.
Did you ever wonder what are when HELA cells came to exist ?In the book the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, The author answers all your questestion that you could ever have about HELA cells. In this book be theme would be injustice because the doctors took the cells form her Henrietta without her knowing because she was poor and didn’t have the money. HELA cells first came to be when Henrietta Lacks was telling a couple of her friends that she felt like she had a knot in her stomach. Five months later she had a child, but the pain in her stomach still continued, so she finally went to doctor Jones to look inside her to see if there was anything wrong. When the doctor was done with his inspection he told her that she
Technology is supposed to be seen as such an advancement and great accomplishment. What others may not always know is sometimes it isn’t all fun and games, it could be dangerous. As seen when we created the atomic bomb and guns, their only purpose is to destroy and cause pain to others. Although they are not always in use they are a constant threat to our well being. We need to take into consideration the positives and the negatives of the technology we create now in present day. Many people change their position on this overarching question: What responsibility do people have when developing new technology? In the texts “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley, “the Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot, and “De-Extinction” answers the questions that it may impose. Each of these texts share one same belief: Society holds
Can your cells change medical history? If you are like me then “No” would be the assumed answer. For Henrietta Lacks that answer would come to be “yes.” Today, I would like to tell you about who Henrietta Lacks was, her diagnoses and later death, and what impact her cells had on modern science. I have read several articles and a book on her brief life while researching this speech. You might ask yourself why I should know this. The answer to that would be because your cells are important. Henrietta Lacks did not think she was anything other than a wife and a mother but later came to be known as medical breakthrough.