Henrietta Lacks

In 1951, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took cell samples from a cancer patient without her knowledge or permission. This woman, Henrietta Lacks, has been a controversial topic ever since. For years, Dr. George Gey had been trying to make human cells divide and multiply continuously, and when the cell sample that had been taken from Mrs. Lacks began to do just that, he was understandably ecstatic. Having a limitless supply of living human cells allowed doctors to test how human cells reacted…

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…

The best society is one in which every member is driven to lift an equal part, and no one is left with too little or too much of the weight. The books The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Never Let Me Go by Rebecca Skloot and Kazuo Ishiguro, respectively, illustrate the consequences of when this balance is broken. This arises as a result of the existence of people who give to, but do not receive from the common good. Contrary to how they function in these books, societies are most successful…

Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman born on August 1, 1920 in Southern Virginia. She is best known as the woman with the immortal cells. She was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer in 1951 at John Hopkins University by Dr. George Gey. She died in 1951 at the age of 31. During her cervical-cancer biopsy Dr. Gey snipped samples from her tissue without the consent of the patient to run studies on the cells that were grown from the tumor. That is how Henrietta Lacks made one of the…

woman never died. This launched a revolution that shifted the course of medical history and lead to innumerable discoveries that have in some way affected nearly every human being on the planet. In her best-selling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot tells the story of a kind and caring black women in the 1950’s who never ever knew her cells were being taken for research, and while Skloot certainly establishes both ethos and logos, her most effective writing and…

Henrietta Lacks was feeling sick 1952, she visited john Hopkins hospital for medical test. Doctors found out that she was suffering from cervical cancer. At that time a doctor name George Gey was working at the hospital, him and his colleagues were working in the lab trying to grow the first immortal human cell that could live outside the body and multiplies over time but they have been failing for years. While Henrietta was at the hospital some of her cells were taken without a consent and…

Henrietta being taken from is now known to many but no one has made the effort to correct this in any way, in fact even though Henrietta's family is popular in the health field, they cannot afford health insurance.. Rebecca writes about Henrietta's family…

somebody took something from you and then it became a billion-dollar industry? What if what they took was part of your body? This the peculiar situation Henrietta Lacks went through in 1951. Mrs. Lacks was a 30-year-old African American who was diagnosed with cervical cancer at John Hopkins Hospital. Being a young, black woman in the 1950’s meant Henrietta respected the doctors and didn’t think they would do any wrong. That’s until they collected a sample of her cancer cells without her…

cells have affected an abundance of people. Original HeLa cells were cut from the cervix of the African American woman known as Henrietta Lacks. Born as Loretta Lacks, Henrietta was born in Roanoke, Virginia on August 1, 1920. At the age of 30, Henrietta was diagnosed with “Epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, Stage I” (24). Her cancer could not be defeated and Henrietta died October 4, 1951. Before her death, Dr. George Gey of George Hopkins Hospital cut a piece of her cancerous cervix…

Due to being an avid reader since the age of six, I have read a wide variety of books. The latest book I’ve finished, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is among the top of my favorite book lists. While reading it, I came to the conclusion that in earlier times of medicine, there was quite a few Caucasian doctors who did not share their motives or the African American patients results from tests, whether the tests were actually needed or not. Many of the African American patients were very…