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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

930 Words4 Pages

At times, doctors have to choose between the preservation and honor of a patient's dignity or to break ethical guidelines to help the human races’ health. A doctor who puts his patients’ well-being as his priority, usually respects the patient’s wishes. However, many factors influence a person’s decision to conduct an unethical experiment. In the contemporary biography, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot shows that scientists constantly discover and develop new concepts and procedures that help heal numerous people, despite the unethical experiments that they conduct on living organisms. Firstly, the opinion of one person can make up the opinion of another person. Humans naturally follow a leader, so one person’s choice can …show more content…

Many doctors who worked with either Henrietta or her cells like Gey, Southam, Mandel, TeLinde, and Kubicek conducted or assisted with unethical experiments. They choose to. Some of these successful medical experts studied at John Hopkins, the best medical institution in the America, and had high positions in respected medical organizations. However, because no one knew much about immortal cells, every medical scientist raced to see who could develop or discover the next big things for medical history. To have their names written down and remembered forever, made the risk worth the …show more content…

Scientists and doctors would not know the techniques and knowledge with only the use of cadavers or other organisms. Without all of the inhumane studies, many diseases that people die from today might not have treatments. Lengauer used Hela cells to help develop “fluorescent in situ hybridization” which after shown under an ultraviolet light, produced “a beautiful mosaic of colored chromosomes” (234). Skloot creates examples of how people do not cherish something, at times, because they do not fully know or fully comprehend the subject. Just like the reader can judge the doctors for their choice to conduct unethical experiments, just like the white people judge the black people because of their skin color, and just like how people dismiss science as a boring subject, until they take the time to understand it. They realize things that they had dismissed

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