What Is The True Meaning Of The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

When trying to review a book several aspects of it are usually considered. Those aspects include: themes, characters, plot, and the like. When reading a book, it can be hard to pick out those aspects. It is then that the true meaning of the book may be missed. That is why sometimes people come away from a book with very different meanings from what they read. This is usually due to what lens a person may be looking through when they are reading and trying to digest this book. When reading, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” the injustice done to the Lacks family is largely due to the god-likeness of the doctors at the time coupled with the racist nature of people at the time. The book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” tells the story of the women, Henrietta Lacks and her family. It begins with Henrietta growing up in Lacks’ Town just outside of Clover. She is the African American descendant of a white plantation owner who had left some land to his family and hers when he died. While growing up, Henrietta went to school and worked in the fields until a few years after she married her cousin, David Lacks. Eventually, Henrietta would be the mother of five children and her and the family would move to Turner’s Station so David could work in the steel factory there. While there, Henrietta developed cervical cancer that at first seemed beatable, but would eventually kill her. Concurrently there was a race for scientists to culture cells in a lab which was finally accomplished using Henrietta’s cervical cancer cells. These cells called HeLa were the reason that many scientific discoveries like the polo vaccine and breakthroughs in cancer research have been made. It is still the most widely used cell cultures that are being used in labs all over the world. The family of Henrietta Lacks never got justice until this book was published. That injustice to the family was eventually righted by Rebecca Skloot who hunted and hounded the Lacks family until she won their trust to start writing the book. This lead to people all over the country to start recognize the family. This sadly caused Deborah Lacks the youngest daughter of Henrietta Lacks to have manic behavior and have a stroke at one point from all the stress she was under. In the end, Deborah eventually would die before the book was published. When looking at this book though there is a deeper meaning to it other than the injustice that the family faced. There is the racism that was prevalent in the United States, but especially in the medical field. There is the constant misuse of impoverished patients for scientific research. These patients were taken advantage of for their lack of knowledge or because of their color. These medical practices were prevalent in that time. This was the case of Henrietta Lacks, John Moore, the Tuskegee Study, and the Nazi studies. “Sixteen years earlier, on August 20, 1947, a U.S. – led war tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, had sentenced …show more content…
This book tells the tale of the horrors that doctors would do to patients in the name of science. “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” is significant to our society because it shows how far that the United States has come in medical practice. No longer are we performing barbaric acts that helped more often than hurt all in the name of science. The laws that have come about in regards to how a doctor should treat a patient have made it nearly impossible for a doctor to mistreat a patient without going to measures to cover up their tracks. This book can be used in a variety of different ways from teaching a doctor about ethics in the medical field to teaching students about the medical history and the cost of scientific progress. This book is so vastly important to science that it should be read by many a scientist in the age of the Genome project and gene splicing. These and many other fields need to take care in what they do in regards to their research. So long as none of the methods outlined in this book are used today then those sciences will achieve success without putting their research at risk due unethical practices. That is what makes this book significant to a plethora of