Essay On The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

When you hear the word “immortal”, what automatically comes to mind? Do you believe in immortality, could somebody really live forever? What if they die, but part of them lives on… Henrietta Lacks died in 1951, but there is still a part of her that is alive today, her cells. In fact billions of her cells. In Rebecca Skloot’s novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, she discusses how after Henrietta dies a part of her lives on. The book summarizes her life and family, her cells, and their significance to science. Skloot successfully argues that Lacks’s cells became a scientific marvel, being used world wide, which her family had absolutely no knowledge of. The background of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks all comes back to an eager

She initially learned about Henrietta when she was enrolled in a community college biology class. The professor was talking about cells, more specifically mitosis. This is where Henrietta’s cells come into play. The professor declared that Henrietta’s cells were producing a new generation of cells every twenty-four hours, they were known as HeLa cells (for Henrietta Lacks). This was astonishing because no human cells had ever stayed alive this long outside the body, nevermind continue reproducing. Dumbfound Skloot was instantaneously curious to discover more about Henrietta. As Skloot worked her way through graduate school she became determined to one day tell Henrietta’s story. She goes on to get incontact with her family, she conducts hours on top of hours of interviews, just so she can capture every detail, in efforts to do this story justice. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is broken up into three sections, “Life”, “Death”, and “Immortality”. Part 1, “Life” introduces Henrietta and her family. It goes on to describe Henrietta discovering the first bump on her cervix, which eventually leads to cervical cancer. In this section of the novel we meet Henrietta’s family, and learn about