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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

585 Words3 Pages

Within the novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks written by Rebecca Skloot, Lacks and her family face many adversities. One adversity major mistreatment of Henrietta is while she's in the care of Dr. Gey. During her struggles Dr. Gey was removing tissue samples without informing Lacks his full intentions which was very wrong, but the arrival of Henrietta's cells proved to be vital in the advancement of the Science and medical fields. A sudden boom of new scientific research, and medical breakthroughs were now within in reach. One example of a major solution solved by HeLa cells was the expense of culturing cells, before Scientist would have to kill monkeys to obtain cells in order to run neutralization tests, this proved to be costly and …show more content…

As soon as Gey realized what he had discovered he ordered a large factory to be built to mass produce HeLa cells, its main purpose was to discover a cure for Polio (Skloot, Pg. 93), but not only did it provide aid in the medical world, but companies such as cosmetic corporations could test the effects of their makeup and other cosmetics on cell health (Skloot, Pg. 102). The possibilities of research with HeLa cell were endless, anything from the research on atomic radiations effect on cells and how to reverse the damage, to the discovery of cells being able to live on after the extraction of their nucleus, and even the vast amount of studies of chemotherapy drugs, hormones, vitamins, and environmental stress proved the importance of HeLa cells in modern research (Skloot, Pg. 102). For the first time ever, scientists were able to properly identify the correct number of chromosomes and map them out, this further lead to the ability of being able to diagnose diseases where individuals had an excess or lack of chromosomes such as Trisomy 21 or Klinefelter syndrome (Skloot, Pg. 100). The science world had finally found a way to overcome the expense and strenuous procedures to obtain cell subjects, scientist could test the effect of gravity, the pressure of deep sea diving by spinning the cells in a centrifuge (Skloot,

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