Imagine being afraid of going to see the doctor, thinking that they will try to harm you in some way. Imagine experiencing pain beyond belief and not knowing that if the doctors had just treated you earlier you might not have had to go through the hurt you’re going through. Finally imagine that this was your situation as a young African American female growing up in the south during the Jim Crow era, which meant that you were segregated from the white people and mistreated by them as well. This is the story of the unsung hero: Henrietta Lacks. She contributed many of the scientific discoveries today, especially towards the medical field. However, these benefits can at the cost of her life. Henrietta’s unbeknown sacrifice to the betterment of …show more content…
science without a doubt fits into the theme of “Truth and Justice.” Henrietta Lacks was the eighth child born of ten in a poor African American family, in 1920.
When she was just four years old, her mother had died, causing her father to take all the children to a small town Clover, Virginia, to divide the children amongst the many relatives that had lived there. Henrietta went to her grandfather to a small four-room cabin, which was formerly a slave house, and was dubbed the “home-house” by the family. Once there she helped pick the sticky tobacco in the fields that surrounded the house with her cousins after she had finished tending to the animals in at the farm her grandfather owned. At night she and her cousins would make a bonfire and tell stories and have fun like all kids do when they are young. There was one cousin in particular with whom she had grown a special connection with David Lacks, her grandfather’s other grandchild. Henrietta and Day (the family called David this because of their southern drawl) played and worked in the fields together, they also shared a bed with one another in the …show more content…
home-house. Henrietta went on to marry Day and have five children with him. They had moved to Turner Station outside of Baltimore after Day had found out about the abundance of work opportunities for black men in a steel mill there during World War II. It is here that Henrietta began to notice some abnormalities with the way her body felt. One night she got into her bathtub in their home and put her finger into her vagina, to her Cervix, in order to see if something was there because she had gotten the sense that something was. She had felt something hard there in her Cervix. Later she found out that she had Cervical Cancer and that the thing she was feeling was a tumor. After discovering this, she went to get treatment when she felt it was absolutely necessary because she had not liked to go to the doctor for just anything even if something was causing her immense pain. She was unable to go to the nearest hospital because that was a whites-only hospital. This means that even if a black person was on their deathbed the hospital refused to treat them, and would rather they died then help them. Therefore that meant she needed to go further away to get the John Hopkins Hospital, which had accepted African American patients, but the wards were still segregated. There she began to get Radiation treatments. In the beginning of her treatment, she was allowed to go home, after they gave her the Radiation. When she got home she noticed that the pain from her cancer became progressively then suddenly worse, so much so that she made Day drive her to the hospital before she was a set for her next treatment. Upon arrival, the doctors examined her and said that she was fine. Then she went back home, but she knew she was not fine. Her Radiation treatments continued, however on one day the doctors had noticed that the tumors were spreading at an alarming rate.
Therefore she was not allowed to go back home and had to take more Radiation treatments. After these, the areas in which they treated her became black. A scientist at the time, George Gey was trying to create the first ever human cell that could survive outside of the body. He had been asking for samples of patient’s tumors at Hopkins to do this. It is important to note that these samples were taken without the patient’s permission. So far all the samples had not survived, then he got Henrietta’s sample. He had expected her sample to die too, and the sample of her Cervix that was not infected with tumors did, but the sample of her tumor had survived. He had named the samples after the first two and last two letters of the patient from which a sample came, thus HeLa was created. Not long after that Henrietta had died from her cancer, leaving a legacy of herself that has not died even to this
day. The HeLa cells lead to tremendous advances in the research of cancer and how to treat it. HeLa cells were used to test the Polio vaccine that cured and saved millions of lives and HeLa helped scientist make numerous discoveries about cloning. HeLa even was shot into space before a human was to test what the implications of being in space had on a human cell. The scientific advances that came as a result of the sacrifice that Henrietta unknowingly made, cannot be underestimated. When faced with racism and discrimination, she instead gave her life to save the lives of others. The same people that may have been judging her based on the color of her skin. Henrietta and her bravery to deal with pain unimaginable and still lead a successful and caring life is an inspiration to me. She is definitely an example, along with Dr. King, of someone that can change so much by doing something that can help the future generations to come.
From the persistent phone calls phone calls explaining her intentions to the accurate portrayal that the family so desperately wanted for Henrietta. Skloot dismantles the idea that Henrietta and her family were nothing but abstractions that did not have a place in the media or scientific community and builds on the fact that HeLa cells once belonged to a human being. That human being was a beautiful woman with “... walnut eyes, straight white teeth, and full lips… She kept her nails short so bread dough wouldn’t stick under them when she kneaded it, but she always painted them a deep red to match her toenails.”
All I can say is amazing information of your glorious and late Henrietta Lacks. This incedible women bettered our society in ways no common human could understand at the time because of how complex this matter was and still very much indeed is. I know there is much contraversy with the matter of how scientists achived immortal cells from your late relative, and I do strongly agree with the fact that it was wrong for these researches to take advantage of this incredible women, but I know it is not for me to say nonethless it must be said that even though it was wrong to take Lacks’ cells when she was dying sometimes one must suffer to bring joy to the entire world.
This section is used to demonstrate to the reader the enormous effects of her death to both her family and science. Immediately following Henrietta's death, Dr. Gey is anxious to take as many samples from her body as possible. However, he must first obtain permission from her husband for an autopsy. Henrietta's husband, Day, is tricked into giving permission. He is told the autopsy will provide test results that may help his children in the future. During the autopsy, Gey's assistant Mary Kubicek takes notice to Henrietta's painted toenails and realizes that HeLa cells belong to an actual person. She says, "they came from a live woman" (Skloot 91). A few days after the autopsy, Henrietta's body is sent from Baltimore to Clover. Henrietta is buried a few days later in an unmarked grave alongside her mother in Lacks Town. Her death is swift and little mourning is conducted by the family. By placing this section second, the reader gains insight into Henrietta's family. Her children are treated poorly and her husband is absent most of the time following her death. This section is important in understanding and gaining insight into the people closest to
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by: Rebecca Skloot has a lot of themes, but one that is most relevant in my opinion is the racial politics of medicine. Throughout the chapters, there were examples of how Henrietta, being African American, prevented her from receiving the same treatment as the white woman sitting right next to her in the waiting room. The story begins with Henrietta going to Johns Hopkins Hospital and asking a physician to check a “knot on her womb.” Skloot describes that Henrietta had been having pain around that area for about a year, and talked about it with her family, but did not do anything until the pains got intolerable. The doctor near her house had checked if she had syphilis, but it came back negative, and he recommended her to go to John Hopkins, a known university hospital that was the only hospital in the area that would treat African American patients during the era of Jim Crow. It was a long commute, but they had no choice. Patient records detail some of her prior history and provide readers with background knowledge: Henrietta was one of ten siblings, having six or seven years of schooling, five children of her own, and a past of declining medical treatments. The odd thing was that she did not follow up on upcoming clinic visits. The tests discovered a purple lump on the cervix about the size of a nickel. Dr. Howard Jones took a sample around the tissue and sent it to the laboratory.
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...
The Belmont Report identifies three core principles that are to be respected when using human subjects for research. The three ethical principles are: respect for persons, beneficence and justice. In the case of Henrietta Lacks each of these fundamental components are violated. The consent that Henrietta provided was not sufficient for the procedures that were conducted.
Imagine that you were Douglas Mawson, along with two other explorers exploring unknown Antarctica, when everything goes wrong. Douglas Mawson suffered more adversity than Henrietta Lacks and Phineas Gage. Henrietta Lacks is about a woman who died from cervical cancer and her cells were extracted; later to find that her cells were immortal. Phineas Gage was a normal man when an extraordinary thing happened—he had a iron rod go through his skull. Phineas gage didn’t go through as much hardship, but he did go through more than Lacks. Half way through Mawson’s journey, both of his partners died, and it was just him, all alone in Antarctica. So, as anyone could see, Mawson experiences the most adversity among the three figures for many reasons.
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.
Most people live in capitalist societies where money matters a lot. Essentially, ownership is also of significance since it decides to whom the money goes. In present days, human tissues matter in the scientific field. Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, shows how Henrietta Lacks’s cells have been used well, and at the same time, how they have been a hot potato in science because of the problem of the ownership. This engages readers to try to answer the question, “Should legal ownership have to be given to people?” For that answer, yes. People should be given the rights to ownership over their tissues for patients to decide if they are willing to donate their tissues or not. Reasons will be explained as follows.
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
She died in 1951, and yet she is still alive. Literally, Henrietta Lacks has been unwittingly immortalized through her cells (HeLa) which have multiplied in laboratories throughout the world. The 2010 bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks also breathed life to the controversy surrounding her cells: should the Lacks family receive monetary compensation for HeLa’s immense contribution to science and medicine? That answer is a resolute no.
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.
What is privacy? Well, it’s the state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people. In terms of information, it is the right to have some control over how one’s own personal information is collected and used. This is a right that has been inherently protected by the U.S Constitution, agreed upon by the Supreme Court, and yet, issues around this very topic arise every day. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the author Rebecca Skloot, addresses this issue in her story of the women behind the infamous HeLa cells. Her story shows that although privacy is a right that is inherently protected by the law, situations of injustice can still occur. Examples of this in the book include when Henrietta’s cells were given to Dr. Gey without any consent from Day, the situation in which Mr. Golde’s spleen was sold without his permission, as well as when the Lacks family were recontacted and mislead about the reasons they were tested years after Henrietta’s death.
The movie does not do Henrietta Lacks justice, and neither has almost anyone who has came in contact with her cells. Henrietta Lacks and the whole Lacks family suffered so much and continue to suffer today, especially financially. A struggle that could have been resolved by many culprits mentioned in the book. Abundant amounts of people have different thoughts on whether or not the family's opinions or Henrietta's consent mattered, but there is no doubt that some type of justice should have been served.