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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot was published in 2010 and instantly became a New York Times bestseller. The book is a summary of Henrietta's life, including the medical history and issues with bioethical she faces. The book contains a lot of obvious issues with this topic that the reader can see instantly. Skloot does not come out directly and point them all out, as they were presented to the reader by telling the story with a violation of Henrietta's rights and tying bioethical issues within them. Henrietta Lacks’s life and human rights get violated throughout her lifetime due to bioethical issues, selfishness, and by others injecting her own cells into thousands of people without her knowledge and consent.
Before getting …show more content…

The big problem was if they had informed Henrietta and her family, what would happen if they said no to the use of her cells? As you learn when you are reading, when the researchers found out that these specific cells can do many beneficial things for the world they did not turn this chance down. In the book, it states, “TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge. Many scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment . . . as Howard Jones once wrote, ‘Hopkins, with its large indigent black population, had no dearth of clinical material’ ”(Skloot 29). This explains the attitude of what scientists used to take cells from an individual without their consent or knowledge of one. If they said no, they could not continue to distribute the cells and save many people. They then proceeded to use her cells in different ways, disregarding the whole idea of how the family would feel if Henrietta’s cells were still in present use. In today's society, you would need permission to do anything in the medical field, however, these times were different, and Henrietta had no say in whatever the doctors wanted to do with her cells. Not only when they found out that the HeLa cells could be used to benefit things and started injecting them, they continued to do this as …show more content…

Selfishness is a major key point in this book. As mentioned above, Henrietta’s family did not find out until 25 years later about the use of her cells. You can tell that once the medical field found something that could benefit them with money, and business, they are going to take advantage of that. They hid a big thing that violated an individual's rights to benefit them. Them waiting 25 years to mention it to Henrietta’s family also gave them the opportunity to not have them take away the cells. This is because the time frame after was from so long ago that there was not going to be much evidence presented to prove them “guilty.” The laws were so different back then that cases such as this would be hard to prove. Overall, because of this time period, the medical field took advantage of an individual. Disregarding the time period, any medical field should not take any opportunity that makes them take advantage of one’s given human

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