The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Analysis

In 1951, a lab assistant named Mary Kubicek attended an autopsy at John Hopkins Hospital. On the autopsy table laid a poor African American woman who had died at the age of thirty from cervical cancer that consumed so much of her body that there was hardly an organ that was not overtaken by disease. The young lab assistant had never seen a dead body before and attempted to avoid looking at the face of the deceased woman. Instead, she focused on the woman’s hands and feet. That is when she noticed the woman’s chipped red toenail polish. Later, Mary Kubicek told the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot, that when she saw the polish on the deceased woman’s toenails, she nearly fainted. “I started imagining her sitting in a bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman (Skloot, pg. 91).”

When Lacks went to the segregated section of John Hopkins Hospital for cancer treatment, doctors sliced away samples of both her malignant and healthy cervical tissue. Doctors at the hospital took Henrietta’s samples without her permission and used them on their quest to discover an immortal cell line, one that continuously reproduces and can be used for the steady cell supply for medical research. The first immortal cell line was unethically discovered in Henrietta’s cells. Henrietta Lacks was a beloved mother, wife, and friend. Her individual humanity should have been acknowledged and respected by those whom she had put her life in the hands of. She was a human being, not a science