Henrietta Lacks Book Report

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, also known as HeLa is credited for the huge advancements in the medical industry such as for polio, cancer, and many viruses
The first human cells to have an infinite human cell line to be grown in a century while the human which possess these cells have been died for six decades. HeLa cells were vital to the huge advancements in human medical technology and research. It helped to create a vaccine for polio, advancements in cancer and many viruses, and most importantly, the cells were to become a multi-million dollar industry. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains unknown buried in an unmarked grave. Most people not even knowing her name, her race and gender.
Rebecca Skloot describes the experimentation at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from the

small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the experimentation of Henrietta Lacks.
Henrietta's family did not learn of her cells until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists began using her husband and children in research without consent.

Even though her cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human materials, her family never saw any of the profits from the industry. The book connects the dark history of experimentation on African Americans without consent to the birth of race issues on medical research and finally to the court battles over if we have control over our own bodies.
The narrator (Rebecca Skloot) becomes connected into the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah, who was interested about the mother she never knew. Deborah was filled with questions: Had scientists created a half monster half her mother? Does the research hurt her in the afterlife? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? If her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance?
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” describes the advancements in technology and the consequences for the

advances.