Henrietta Lacks Research Paper

Sarah Robson

Mrs.Mulroy

A.P Bio

11 Sept 2016 “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” Henrietta Lacks was a thirty-year-old black woman who lived on a farm, as a tobacco farmer in southern Virginia. She was born in 1920, as Loretta Pleasant, she lived in a house in Roanoke, Virginia with her parents and her eight older siblings. That all changed when her mother died during childbirth and the father couldn’t take care of them, Henrietta was sent to live with her grandfather Tommy Lacks on his farm with her cousin David Lacks. Henrietta Lacks and Day were close with each other, they even had children. As they got older Day went to work leaving Henrietta and the kids behind to make enough money for a house,

However, about a week later Henrietta turned out pregnant again with her fifth child, the two cousins told her that the pain was probably the baby, Henrietta on the other hand, thought it was still something different because “it was before the baby” (Skloot 14). After her son was born, Henrietta found some spotting in her underwear even though it was not her time of the month, she went into a bath and put her fingers up into her cervix and found a lump, she told her husband about it and they went to the local doctor. After they examined her the doctor thought it to be syphilis, however, the test came back negative, her doctor told her to go to Johns Hopkins. When she was there with Howard Jones, the doctor never saw anything like this tumor and took a sample of it. She would later come back to the hospital for treatment, during her surgery where they took a sample of her cells without her knowing. In the lab, Mary was doing a sterilization

The practice was common back in the 1950’s, Henrietta did not ask any questions because of this practice and also segregation laws were still in effect, so “black people didn’t question white people’s professional judgment”(Skloot 63). When Henrietta was unconscious on the operating table she believed that she was just getting radium to treat cancer, they were also taking tissue of her tumor, and healthy tissue cells from her cervix, this is an ethical issue because “no one had told Henrietta that TeLinde was collecting samples”, they also had not asked “if she wanted to be a donor”(Skloot 33). Another issue of this, is when Henrietta did not receive any credit for what she has done and the family did not even know about this until two decades later after her cells were harvested and cloned, they even released a genome of the strain of the HeLa cells without the family’s