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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

1217 Words5 Pages

After her death in 1951, for six decades, the name Henrietta Lacks was not a recognized name in the eyes of the society, but cells containing her DNA did. HeLa Cells are the first immortal human cells, cancerous cells taken from Henrietta’s cervix never die, in fact they multiply every twenty-four hours. After spending 10 years to perfect her first book, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot encapsulated the life, the death, and aftermath of Henrietta Lacks’ life. Throughout her book, Rebecca Skloot takes the reader on an extraordinary journey through the lens of the Lacks family, dealing with controversial issues regarding science, ethics, race, and class. The journey of the Lacks families started in Henrietta’s hometown Clover, Virginia then progressed to the “colored” ward of …show more content…

Those who live on a very low income, who are from developing countries or are part of the lower classes agree to participate for financial reasons, and usually were not fully informed about all of the risks and side effects (Moreno). In the United States the more vulnerable segments of the population have continuously been the subjects of medical experimentation, but African Americans, including children, assumed a unbalanced burden and suffered the most brutal, and invasive of the medical experiments. In the article written by Jonathan D. Moreno, “Master Sergeant James B. Stanley volunteered to be a subject in a study advertised as developing and testing measures against chemical weapons, but Stanley was never told that the clear liquid he drank for the test contained a psychoactive drug, nor was he debriefed or monitored for the hallucinations that followed, nor did he understand the source of the emotional problems that disrupted his personal life, leading finally to his divorce in

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