Ethos, Pathos, Logos In The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks?

On February 8th of 1951, the immortality of HeLa cells was discovered. Such breakthrough caused an outburst in scientific development and the release of ways to cure millions of diseases, including, but not limited to, polio, cancer, leukemia, and hemophilia. Following this further, Rebecca Skloot is able to describe the person behind the HeLa cells and the interminable process that she had to go through in order to attain enough information to write about Henrietta Lacks and her immortal cells. Skloot’s utilization of rhetorical strategies – the use of ethos, logos, and pathos – effectively engages and retains the reader in the life experience of not only Henrietta and her surroundings, but also in Skloot’s research journey on the lookout for unpublicized but highly valuable information. Skloot strived on finding and publicizing Henrietta Lacks’ life story, including those small details that not even her children had heard of before. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the great provision of facts and information …show more content…
Skloot honestly states her lack of scientific experience, but she explains the hard work she put into portraying every detailed she obtained from hundreds of people. The credibility of Skloot is best supported by those she interviewed than by herself. At the end of her book she says, “For more information on the growth potential of a normal cell, see Hayflick and Moorehead…Experimental Cell Research 25…” (Skloot 248). In order to concretely consider Skloot’s work as credible, one must also research the interviewees. The use of ethos is clearly not the best rhetorical strategy to entertain the reader in the story of Henrietta Lacks, as it is the use of logos. Emphasis on Skloot’s credibility is rarely suggested, but substantial descriptions of what Skloot experienced on her journey and the many details that she obtained are enough to captivate the