The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Analysis

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Henrietta Lacks was completely unaware when doctors from John Hopkins Hospital extracted cells from her cervix. She was completely unaware that they would soon be grown in culture and multiply to eventually weigh over three hundred million metric tons. Even after Henrietta’s gruesome, tumor-filled death, these cells appeared immortal, and helped doctors treat countless diseases such as polio and influenza. These HeLa cells were said to be “‘one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years,’” yet the woman from which they came remained nameless and virtually unknown for several decades.
Rebecca Skloot’s New York Times Bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is an account of Skloot’s journey to uncover

Summary: The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks
963 Words | 2 Pages
An abstraction can be defined as something that only exists as an idea. People are considered abstractions when they are dehumanized, forgotten about, or segregated and discriminated against. The scientific community and the media treated Henrietta Lacks and her family as abstractions in several ways including; forgetting the person behind HeLa cells, giving sub-par health care compared to Caucasians, and not giving reparations to the Lacks family. On the other hand, Rebecca Skloot offers a different perspective that is shown throughout the book. Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks describes the trials and tribulations the Lacks family has gone through because of HeLa cells and shows how seeing a person as an abstraction is a dangerous thing.
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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Rhetorical Analysis
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Henrietta’s cells were being inaugurated with space travel, infused into rat cells, and even being used to make infertile hens fertile again. However, these are only a few of the many accomplishments that Henrietta’s immortal cells made possible: “The National Cancer Institute was using various cells, including HeLa, to screen more than thirty thousand chemicals and plant extracts, which would yield several of today’s most widely used and effective chemotherapy drugs, including Vincristine and Taxol,”(pg.139). This example of logos from the text again shows just how important these Henrietta’s cells were to the future developments in
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Essay Letter To Henrietta Lacks
411 Words | 1 Pages
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.
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
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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...
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The Importance Of Adversity In 'Henrietta Lacks'
780 Words | 2 Pages
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.
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
1391 Words | 3 Pages
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.
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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Essay
1523 Words | 4 Pages
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.
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Theme Of Medical Ethics In The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks
1564 Words | 4 Pages
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
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Critical Analysis of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
1039 Words | 3 Pages
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.
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Rhetorical Themes In The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks
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I was a science journalist who referred to all things supernatural as “woo-woo stuff”; Deborah believed Henrietta’s spirit lived on in her cells” (p. 7). Here, Skloot tells about where herself and Deborah Lacks were from and their feelings about “supernatural” occurrences. Skloot draws a contrast between the backgrounds and sentiments of herself and Deborah to demonstrate the differences that upbringing and environmental influences can arouse in two people; Skloot introduces the dynamic of race to demonstrate that race and economic status were, and still are,
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Book Review: The Immoral Life of Henrietta Lacks
1084 Words | 3 Pages
HeLa cells were one of the greatest medical inventions that came about for the scientific field and yet the woman behind this medical feat is not fully remembered and honored. Her cells and tissue were taken away from her without consent and more than that, she was exploited for being black and not questioning what the doctor was doing. Her family suffered through countless years of agonizing pain in which they were misinformed about where and what her cells were being used for. Yes, HeLa cells changed the way we view medicine today, but only at the cost of creating one of the greatest controversies of owning ones body.
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Research Paper On Henrietta Lacks
619 Words | 2 Pages
Abstract: Henrietta Lacks was born in Virginia on August 1, 1920. In 1941 she married her first cousin David Lacks. A mother of five, she went to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland on January 29, 1951, because she felt a knot in her stomach. Her family and her assumed she was pregnant, which was true, but after giving birth to her son she started to bleed abnormally. She was then referred to Johns Hopkins hospital where she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. The doctors treated her with radiation therapy and cut out samples from her cervix, these cells became known as the HeLa cells and have had an immense impact on medicine throughout history.
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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Analysis
176 Words | 1 Pages
Would you allow someone to take advantage of your cells and not expect compensation for it? The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks written by Rebecca Skoot is a story of a lady was taken advantage of without knowing it. The theme of this story is sorrow, the tells of Henrietta lacks is very depressing, for herself and her loved ones in this book. This happens to a black lady in the1940’s and she was oblivious to all of this and the tumor. Tell this day nothing was doing to help her nor her family that’s what I fell like the theme of this book is sorrow. She was in the doctor’s care when all of this had taken place. The doctors fell like they didn’t do anything wrong since Henrietta wasn’t paying for the treatments. The doctors felt like when
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Ethos in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
619 Words | 2 Pages
The credibility and trustworthiness of a person can be achieved through their achievements and titles. Writers have the ability of achieving this by appealing to the rhetorical strategy ethos. Rebecca Skloot’s inclusion of her knowledge in science to provide her credibility and numerous information of all her characters in the novel helps develop the rhetorical strategy of ethos. Skoot’s implementation of appealing to ethos aids in emphasizing on the credibility of both herself and all the other characters in the novel. She demonstrates this rhetorical strategy by indicating titles and achievements her characters in the novel. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot develops the rhetorical strategy of ethos through the use of her characters in the novel consisting of Skloot herself, George Gey, and the virologist Chester Southam.
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Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Essay
636 Words | 2 Pages
I think patients should be given legal ownership over their tissues because it is their body and if they don’t want to share their tissues they shouldn’t have to. It is their choice nobody else’s. The story “Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” it’s about the ethical conduct of research, specifically informed consent. The origins of the informed consent date back to the early twentieth century, even though many situations arose prior to the twentieth century indicating the need for informed consent. Before legislation was put into place requiring informed consent for medical procedures and research on human subjects, courts heard a plethora of battery cases involving doctors. “Even when there are no other accepted medical treatment options, it’s still your right as a competent adult to refuse a treatment that you don’t want or refuse to be in a
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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Analysis

Summary: The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Rhetorical Analysis

Essay Letter To Henrietta Lacks