Comparison Of Honeybee Democracy And The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

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While reading the books Honeybee Democracy and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the theme that stood out to me the most was communication. Both books’ authors are trying to communicate a scientific idea with the audience. Throughout this paper I am going to compare and contrast the theme of communication used in each book. Honeybee Democracy communicates in depth the life of a honeybee. In Henrietta Lacks, the author communicates the history and science behind the HeLa cells.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about a woman who passed away, named Henrietta Lacks, and a man named George Gey who took her cells for research. These cells were taken from Henrietta Lacks’s body in 1951 without her knowledge or consent. …show more content…

They also have some significant differences. Although Henrietta Lacks does communicate the science aspect in the book, it also communicates the whole idea of racism and morality. Henrietta Lacks had me questioning whether or not it was right for Dr.Gey to be using Henrietta’s cells without any permission or credit. My personal opinion is that it was not right of Dr. Gey to do what he did, but the whole moral idea was the significant difference between the books. In Honeybee Democracy, the author Tom Seely definitely kept just science as the main focus of the book. The biggest similarity between the two books for me was the idea that if we did not have honeybees, economically our country would decline, whereas in Henrietta Lacks if we didn’t have the HeLa cells we wouldn’t have found out all of those advances for medicine. Both books communicate that if we didn’t have either the cells or bees, our country, our science community, and our world would be different in bad way without Seely’s and Gey’s findings.

I chose to pick the theme of communication for both books Honeybee Democracy and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I compared and contrasted how I thought the theme of communication was so important in both texts. Without the findings from both Gey and Seely the science community and the world wouldn’t have made as many advances as it did. Seely found a successful way to keep the bee population up. Although Gey found the HeLa cells in a controversial way he still found cures for diseases that help us in our world today. Without those findings our science community wouldn’t be where it is

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