Rebecca Skloot Unethical

What exactly is ethical behavior when it comes to human experimentation? Nowadays, people would claim it has to be honest, fair, safe, and humane. However, that criteria had not prevailed through all of history. Early on, scientists often used questionable techniques to obtain research because ethics would not be an important issue until well into the 20th century. In her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot uses tone and diction to illustrate the historical evolution of the ethics surrounding human experimentation. In the 19th and 20th centuries, researchers did not consider ethics when using minorities in research. For example, doctors tested drugs and new surgical techniques on slaves. The doctors did not even use

Starting from that decade, the U.S. Public Health Service researchers at the Tuskegee Institute recruited black men with syphilis to study how their disease killed people. The researchers watched each man die, even after realizing penicillin could cure him. They chose black subjects specifically because they, along with many other white people, believed black people were “notoriously syphilis-soaked.” The researchers, and the public at the time, did not care about the deaths of a so-called racially inferior group. All the scientists gave to the families of those who died was a fifty-dollar stipend. Here Rebecca Skloot’s tone is more indignant. She chooses to describe the black men’s deaths as slow, painful, and preventable. She is clearly upset at the researchers’ flippant carelessness with black lives and wants the reader to understand the injustice of their actions. Also in the 1930s, in what was called the Mississippi Appendectomies, hysterectomies were performed involuntarily on poor black women. Doctors wanted to practice and to sterilize the women. Again, Skloot’s tone is upset. She uses the word choice of “unnecessary” to enforce that the doctors were not even trying to treat the women. The reason her tone might have been more passionate was because these experiments were part of a conversation she had with Roland Pattillo. She wanted to impress him so he would put her in touch with the Lacks family. A more emotional response was needed to show how much she cared about the wrongdoings black people