The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot
Hannah Henriques
ANT
Dr. Voelker
September 28, 2017
Henrietta Lacks Book Review
In Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Skloot documents the years surrounding her research of Henrietta Lacks, a woman known to most of the world as HeLa. Henrietta lived and died a poor tobacco farmer from the south, living and working on the same farm as her enslaved ancestors. But little did Henrietta know that her cells would change the course of medical research and history forever.
HeLa cells were taken from Henrietta unbeknownst to her by George Gey, a cell biologist at Johns Hopkins hospital, when she went in for a biopsy of the tumor growing inside of her. Today, those cells have been crucial in the development of the polio vaccine, aided scientists in learning more about the secrets of cancer, helped in cloning and gene mapping, and have ultimately, been sold by the billions. Even still, Henrietta was buried in an unmarked grave.
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When removed during her biopsy and then cultured without her permission, her cells began to reproduce rapidly and require more and more culture medium to consume as they grew. They thrived in the lab and they were the first human cells ever in history to do so. Meanwhile, Henrietta, 31, African-American, and a mother of five, continued enduring painful and damaging radiation treatment in the hospital’s “colored only” ward. After Henrietta’s death, her cells, named HeLa after the first two letters of both her names, went on to become a celebrity of virology, benefiting more people than will ever be truly realized. Scientists have grown about 50 million metric tons of her cells, helped sustain and build thousands of careers, and tens of thousands of scientific
Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot
391 Words | 2 PagesHeLa was an immortal line of cells that led to many scientific discoveries. The book “The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks” has many different points you can view from. The book shows how history changed over time, how being African American and poor gets you no rights to privacy, and most importantly how medicine advanced because of Henrietta’s cells. Henrietta was one of ten children. Her mother died while giving birth in a barn.
The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot
461 Words | 2 PagesSo even though Lacks’ is dead her cells aren’t. That’s the main focus point and title of the book comes from. “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” is a non-fiction book narrated by the author Rebecca Skloot. Skloot’s inspiration of this book came from a biology class she took.
Henrietta Lacks: Her Cells In The 1950's And Today
734 Words | 3 PagesThese cells (nicknamed HeLa to protect Henriettas identity) reproduced infinitely like no other. George Gey put HeLa in culture which is cells that are removed from a plant or animal then are put into an artificial environment that is sterile warm and fed with the utmost of vigilance with medium(Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. ). Medium what the cells are fed with were made up of multiple things, because scientists back then used all kinds of things for medium but George Gey used chicken blood, special salts and placenta(Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. ).
The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks
577 Words | 3 PagesDana Garcia Ripley Honors English 2 20 March 2017 Lack of Justice The book The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot tells the story of an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks whose cells made one of the greatest medical contributions ever. Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer at the age of 31. Cells were taken from her body without her knowledge. Rebecca L. Skloot is a self-employed science writer who specializes in science and medicine.
The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot
965 Words | 4 PagesThe Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a novel written by Rebecca Skloot meant to be a memoir of one of the biggest breakthroughs in medical history and the woman that influenced it. Instead of immortalizing her cells like every other publishing company under the quasi-ambiguous name, HeLa, Skloot decided to give the medical miracle a name and tell her story. From life, death, and hereafter, Skloot has told the story of a woman that would have gone forgotten in history, along with the ethical mishaps along the way. The story begins with Skloot telling Henrietta’s life story and her sickness.
The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Houston Mullican
734 Words | 3 PagesShortly after this happened Henrietta died from the cervical cancer on October 4, 1951. It wasn’t until two decades later that Henriettas name was released to the press, and it wasn’t until even later in the 1990’s when Rebecca Skloot heard of HeLa cells and was interested why there was so little information about her. Skloot then comes into contact with Henriettas family and most importantly forms a bond with Deborah, Henrietta’s oldest daughter. This bond with Deborah was crucial to find out information of Henrietta. While researching the bond grows and Skloot realizes that Deborah just wants to learn as much as possible about her mother like she wants too (Skloot Deborah really just wants her mother’s story to be told and people to realize that there is a person behind all the
Henrietta Lacks Essay
672 Words | 3 PagesThe Fluidity of Henrietta Lacks. Gender Norms & Racial Bias in the study of the Modern “Henrietta Lacks” Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman whose cancer cells were the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. An immortalized cell line will reproduce indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data to present day. Lacks was the unwitting source of these cells from a tumor biopsied during treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. in 1951. The cells were then cultured by George Otto Gey who created the cell line known as HeLa, which is still
The Backtory Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot
689 Words | 3 PagesAn example from the book of applied research is injecting these malignant cells into the arms of sick and healthy patients (Skloot, 2010). Another reason for the use of her cells is because the growth of living cells has been unsuccessful prior to receiving the HeLa cells. It could be the lack of mitosis happening in the cell, and the cells have not been able to reproduce, and create copies of themselves. This is another reason, why the doctors have been keeping a close observation of Henrietta’s children, even making up excuses to collect their blood, and keeping everything a secret. This is important to research because you can have a higher risk of getting a disease through your family’s genes.
Henrietta Lacks Research Papers
1145 Words | 5 PagesBorn in Roanoke, Virginia on August 1, 1920, Henrietta Lacks would one day unknowingly be the reason for one of the most important cell lines in medical research. Henrietta Lacks became the source of HeLa cells after her death on October 4, 1951 (aged 31), cells which were the first immortalized cell line in history; immortalized cells are cells that will reproduce indefinitely under specific conditions. While Henrietta’s cells were and continue to be used to treat many illnesses, there was never any consent given from Henrietta herself, or any of her family. To this day, no portion of the billions of dollars made from HeLa cells ever found it’s way to Henrietta’s family. The medical ethics in the 1950’s are very questionable in comparison
The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot
869 Words | 4 PagesAbout 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.
The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot
722 Words | 3 PagesRebecca skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, spent almost a decade gathering research in order to display Henrietta Lacks’s true story in writing. Skloot first found out about Henrietta Lack’s in her science college course at the age of sixteen. After hearing a brief description of Henrietta, with very little information, Skloot had some questions for her professor. When Skloot’s professor did not have any answers for her regarding Henrietta, she decided to take it upon herself to find out everything she could about Henrietta and her family. Skloot dedicated her life to researching Henrietta and the Lack’s family when there was no information about them.
Henrietta Lacks Sparknotes
729 Words | 3 PagesAlong with that, the medical field had very few rules and was still unsanitary which was part of the problem with culturing cells until HeLa. There was also a lot of human experimentation at the time. In addition, there were multiple legal issues that revolved around this story like asking Henrietta for her consent when taking a sample of her cervical tissue for cell culture. They also never told her about the side effect of her cancer treatment about not having kids. Along with this, they started injecting HeLa cells inside of inmates without telling them what it was to see if they would develop cancer.
Henrietta Lacks Impact On Modern Medicine
738 Words | 3 PagesThe cells John Hopkins took from Henrietta’s tumor helped launch a multibillion-dollar industry, yet her family had no money (Monsen, 2011, p.2). “In the past sixty-three years several scientists have won Nobel prizes for research on HeLa Cells.” Henrietta’s genome wasn’t the first to be published. Unlike Henrietta, the other patients gave consent for the doctors to take samples (Barone, 2014,
The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot
1189 Words | 5 Pages"(44) This is important because not only have they been used for treatments, but they also provided a variety of information that certainly made life easier by giving people more options to combat their issues. To balance against the benefits, the scientist's inability to compensate Henrietta Lacks' family was irresponsible because "she's the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty."(168) This means that after all of the uses of the HeLa cells, they were still struggling to make ends meet as they were yet to receive health insurance. Furthermore, Henrietta’s son Lawrence got upset
Henrietta Lacks Thesis
1020 Words | 5 PagesIn 1951, at the age of 31 Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Henrietta was under treatment at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where cells from her malignant tumor were removed. Neither Henrietta nor any of her family members knew about the tissue sample and nor did the Hopkins ever informed them of the situation. Unfortunately after Henrietta’s radiation treatment, her condition continued to worsen and soon she lost her battle to cancer on octomber 4th 1951. Henriettas cells left the Hopkins what they discovered to be known to be the first immortal human cell line.
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