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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

869 Words4 Pages

About 60 years ago, before African Americans had much respect at all, there was a woman named Henrietta Lacks who was diagnosed with cancer in her cervix. Without asking for permission, Henrietta’s doctors took some of her cells from her cervix, and they took them to do more research on them and tried to grow them for the first time outside of a persons body. Because she was African American, she and the rest of her family were not respected by doctors, or many other people at this time. These cells later became very critical to medical advancements and scientific research for the rest of the world. But, the injustice of this situation raises a large controversy over whether or not this is justified. Should the doctors be able to have done this without her consent? Rebecca Skloot wrote the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks to talk about this in more depth.

These doctors took her cells, and used them for research and …show more content…

There are many reasons for this; because the cells weren’t ‘part of” Henrietta anymore so it shouldn’t matter whether the doctors did what they did or not. The problem however, is that Henrietta was not informed on any of this and were not given a real opportunity to give ‘informed consent’ about her cells and tissues on her body. Because of the pressure that they felt from the doctors, they were vulnerable. They weren’t told that tissues were taken from her body, and now, these cells and tissues made many people other than the Lacks family rich, when the Lacks family still struggled to keep their heads above water and to just make it by. “The biggest payday any of the Lacks children ever saw...Day got a check for $12,000 and gave $2,000 to each of his children” (Skloot 208). This isn’t fair to the family that their family members cells are still alive and doctors are making money when the family is

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