Summary Of The Novel The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks?

“HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years.” This quote portrays the overall importance of HeLa cells to the science community, and reveals just how significant the exploitation of Henrietta was. Henrietta Lacks was a middle-aged, African American woman who developed cervical cancer like many others in the 1950’s. However, cell samples were taken from here without consent, and these cells were unlike any cell ever seen before. Tragically, Henrietta died shortly after and her family knew nothing of these cells that were found to be “immortal,” until one day, when their lives would never be the same. Tying into this unethical situation, Rebecca Skloot illustrates in the novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks the importance of bioethics and morality for the protection and privacy of an individual. Rebecca really drives home this theme through the chronological development

One excerpt in the novel states “From the moment the Collier’s article appeared until the seventies, the woman behind the HeLa cells would be known most often as Helen Lane, and sometimes as Helen Larson, but never as Henrietta Lacks. And because of that, her family had no idea her cells were alive.” (Skloot 109). This clearly depicts a major bioethical issue in that a pseudonym was created in order to throw off researchers, the scientific community, and the public from who the cells were obtained from. It is speculated that Gey did this just so he would not be punished for the unlawful obtainment of Henrietta’s cells, or that he did not want the Lacks family to ever known that these were Henrietta’s cells. Nonetheless, as the reader finds out more about Henrietta’s life, they realize how caught up the scientists were in a lie, and scheming so that nobody would catch them in their wrongdoings and deceit of