Rebecca Skloot, the writer for the book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, has been obsessed with Henrietta since she was sixteen-years old. Skloot tried looking up more information about Henrietta and her family but she couldn’t find any information. That’s when Skloot decided that she wanted to tell Henrietta story by writing a book. With Rebecca trying to get in contact with Henrietta daughter Deborah. Skloot didn’t know that the family would become hostile to the fact that they didn’t want to talk to her due to them thinking she was another reporter trying to get information about Henrietta cells.
Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman and a mother of five children living in Baltimore, suffered much pain to the point she described it as a “I got a knot on my womb” (Skloot 13). Henrietta was going back and forth to John Hopkins, a charity hospital and the only one that treated colored patients for treatments due to the knot on her womb. When Lacks finally found out what the knot was the doctors diagnosed her with Cervical Cancer. As time went on, the doctor wanted to start radium treatments on Henrietta. Without Henrietta knowing the doctor cut two dime-size sample of tissue, one cancerous and one healthy to see if the cells would grow. The attending doctor gave the tissue sample to a scientist named George Gey, who has been trying to establish a continuously immortal human cell line for use in cancer research. When George Gey got the tissue samples he told his twenty-one-year old assistant Mary Ku-bieck that he was putting new samples in her cubicle to test the cells and see if they would grow. Mary begin working on Lacks tissues, and named the test tubes with the tissue samples “HeLa”. After Henrietta cells began to grow at a rapid speed, Gey decided to share the news and tissues samples with other scientist. George Gey knew they just made a huge breakthrough on medical technology. Even after the cells began to grow and distributed out to …show more content…
Henrietta children and their children have suffered greatly with no health insurance and living in poverty. Although her cells have had attention and money it was still no help to the family. It raises questions about bioethics on who should benefit from scientific research and how should it be conducted. Deborah daughter did say “If our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors?” (Skloot 9). This is very important because it shows that the family didn’t get any answers from the science community and no one really explained to them why Henrietta cells were so important. Skloot did a really good job on making sure everything in the book was important, because the book has steps of how “HeLa” cells came about and how Henrietta passed away. It also leads to an understanding of how it affected her children when they got older and how they were confused on why the science community didn’t want to help them and the science community making profit and not her family. This book is very interesting and a good understanding for people to know that cases like this one happen in the world all the time, they are just not
Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman and a mother of five children living in Baltimore, suffered much pain to the point she described it as a “I got a knot on my womb” (Skloot 13). Henrietta was going back and forth to John Hopkins, a charity hospital and the only one that treated colored patients for treatments due to the knot on her womb. When Lacks finally found out what the knot was the doctors diagnosed her with Cervical Cancer. As time went on, the doctor wanted to start radium treatments on Henrietta. Without Henrietta knowing the doctor cut two dime-size sample of tissue, one cancerous and one healthy to see if the cells would grow. The attending doctor gave the tissue sample to a scientist named George Gey, who has been trying to establish a continuously immortal human cell line for use in cancer research. When George Gey got the tissue samples he told his twenty-one-year old assistant Mary Ku-bieck that he was putting new samples in her cubicle to test the cells and see if they would grow. Mary begin working on Lacks tissues, and named the test tubes with the tissue samples “HeLa”. After Henrietta cells began to grow at a rapid speed, Gey decided to share the news and tissues samples with other scientist. George Gey knew they just made a huge breakthrough on medical technology. Even after the cells began to grow and distributed out to …show more content…
Henrietta children and their children have suffered greatly with no health insurance and living in poverty. Although her cells have had attention and money it was still no help to the family. It raises questions about bioethics on who should benefit from scientific research and how should it be conducted. Deborah daughter did say “If our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors?” (Skloot 9). This is very important because it shows that the family didn’t get any answers from the science community and no one really explained to them why Henrietta cells were so important. Skloot did a really good job on making sure everything in the book was important, because the book has steps of how “HeLa” cells came about and how Henrietta passed away. It also leads to an understanding of how it affected her children when they got older and how they were confused on why the science community didn’t want to help them and the science community making profit and not her family. This book is very interesting and a good understanding for people to know that cases like this one happen in the world all the time, they are just not