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What Are The Ethical Issues In The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

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HeLa has made a great contribution to the way that the world sees and learns about cells. The HeLa cells have a astonishing story behind them. This story starts with a women names Henrietta Lacks. In the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Rebecca Skloot told us the journey of the Lacks family and pointed out many ethical problems throughout the book. The issue of race was what stood out the most to me as I was reading. Over and over again it was clearly pointed out that Henrietta was a women who was black. This then led people to believe because of her race she did not matter. I believe Skloot saw racism as a problem but did not express this as much as she did other reasons in the book. Race was shown as a problem in several different …show more content…

When Henrietta went to John Hopkins Hospital she soon found out that she had Cervical Cancer. While she was under anesthetics they took some cells without her knowledge and gave them to a lab. If she had been a white women I feel as if they would have asked her for a sample of her cells and respected her decision whether it be yes or no. The hospital continued to do things that she did not know of. The Doctors put countless lies on her health records and did not try there hardest to ease the pain for Henrietta. If it had been a white women she would have been given medicine and therapy to help heal her body and mind but Henrietta was given nothing but a small pain reliever. She was left lying on her death bed while her mind and thoughts destroy her sanity till she …show more content…

Even after Henrietta's death people still kept wanting things from her family when they still didn't even know about her cells. People wanted to do experiments of the family cause their cells had direct connections to Henrietta's. They would tell the family lies such as we are testing to see if they will be positive for cancer but there wasn’t even a test for cancer. The family didn’t know there wasn’t a test because they didn't have knowledge of the science world. Even if the doctors did try to explain the situation to the family they wouldn't understand the meaning of all the big words used. When the family finally learned about the cells they had learned not to trust people asking the about Henrietta and disclosed themselves to the whole situation. They did not care to talk to anyone who wanted to know about the cells or their family knowing that the person really didn’t care about the Lacks family they just wanted answers to there never ending

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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Book Report

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She had so many blood transfusions that the doctors had to cut her off. Henrietta could not fight off the cancer forever and eventually passed away, and after her death nobody told her children as diseases like this were not spoken openly within families, so the children did not know about the mysterious disappearance of there mother for

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Henrietta Lacks Sparknotes

729 Words | 3 Pages

First of all, Henrietta was an African American woman at the time when there was still inequality and segregation towards African Americans. This was really evident when she went in for her checkups at Hopkins and how she was never asked for her consent with her cell tissue. Also, the medical treatments at that time were not very safe or effective. An example would be when they used radium to try and treat her cervical cancer. Little did they know that radium destroys any cells it touches and it can also cause cancer.

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How The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Changed The Medical Field

929 Words | 4 Pages

Not long after Henrietta’s round of radiation, she complained to her doctors, “that she thought the cancer was spreading, that she could feel in moving through her” and the doctors ignored her complaints (63). They told her nothing was wrong and sent her on her way. According to Skloot, that was common practice, especially during the segregation era. Patients did not question doctors because it was assumed doctors knew better and “black people didn’t question white people’s professional judgement” (63). It wasn’t until Henrietta’s forth visit in just a few weeks that they listened to her and took an X-ray of her abdomen that they found a large, inoperable

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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Essay

956 Words | 4 Pages

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is at once a biography, a work of science journalism, and a book about the interconnected topics of ethics, justice, and racism. Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who died from cervical cancer in 1951, was the source of the so-called HeLa cell line, which is “omnipresent” (Skloot, 2010, p. 24) in modern science. The HeLa cell line was derived from Henrietta Lacks’ cancerous tumor, which, against the wishes of Henrietta’s family was taken from her corpse and has been used for prolific and lucrative medical research for over seven decades (Skloot, 2010). Skloot (2010) described The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks as “a biography of both the cells and the woman they came from—someone’s daughter, wife, and mother” (pp. 25-26). While the HeLa cells are ubiquitous in research, the woman from whom they came is, at best, a footnote in biological or medical textbooks.

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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

869 Words | 4 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.

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1597 Words | 7 Pages

When Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951, she left her five children motherless and alone. This includes one of her two daughters, Deborah Lacks. Throughout her life, Deborah never was able to meet her mother and knew of her only as an idea- a woman who died soon after her birth. After Henrietta’s death, she faded into old news and was hardly ever talked about. Deborah only ever wanted to learn more about her mother, going as far as harassing her brother, Lawrence, until he broke down into tears.

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In 1951 Henrietta omplained of a “knot in her uterus” and went to John Hopkins Hospital, a charity hospital for the poor and black, to get it checked out. Her doctor diagnosed the hard lump as cervical cancer and started radiation treatments immediately. Because of the cancer Henrietta couldn’t take care of Elsie, her oldest female child that epilepsy with her other four children. So Henrietta sent Elsie to the Crownsville State Hospital or, hospital for the negro insane until she died a little while after her mother at the age of 15. During one of her surgery’s, her doctor secretly took a slice of her tumor and gave it to Dr. George Gey, a scientist who was trying to find an “immortal cell”. Not only did Gey find what he was looking for, he found cells that grew at an abnormal rate.

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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Summary

567 Words | 3 Pages

Readers can feel Rebecca Skloot is a biased writer from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, who has a little bit racialism thinking. Because her book is

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Henrietta Lacks Research Paper

657 Words | 3 Pages

He killed her, and kept her soul. Patients are lost in the thought of getting help. In reality, what if this help is actually a form of affliction? A huge problem that everyone has is that they constantly let people take advantage of them. Henrietta’s cells saved lives, they continue to do so.

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Argumentative Essay On Henrietta Lacks

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Henrietta Lacks was a black tobacco farmer from the south who, in 1950, at the age of 30, she was diagnosed with aggressive cervical cancer. Lacks went to John’s Hopkins medical center for treatment for her cancer. In April of 1951, she underwent surgery to remove the larger tumor on her cervix. Henrietta Lacks, died three days following the surgery. Even though Henrietta Lacks died, her cells from the tumor have lived on and have made a major impact on the biomedical community.

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How Did Henrietta Lacks Use The Ethics Of Medical And Biological Research?

1381 Words | 6 Pages

What would you do if a doctor took your cells without consent and shortly after, your cells went viral, being sent all over the world to millions of different scientists? Well, I can’t say that Henrietta Lacks lived through this, but I can say that her cells did. Bioethics, the ethics of medical and biological research, has been a controversial issue throughout the U.S. for years. Different laws have been formalized to help tame the fire on the topic of consent and mortality. In the year of 1951, Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer and had too many tumors to count inside her rotting body.

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1020 Words | 5 Pages

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of Henrietta, an African-American woman whose cells were used to create the first immortal human cell line. Told through the eyes of her daughter, Deborah Lacks, aided by journalist Rebecca Skloot. Deborah wanted to learn about her mother, and to understand how the unauthorized harvesting of Lacks cancerous cells in 1951 led to unprecedented medical breakthroughs, changing countless lives and the face of medicine forever. It is a story of medical arrogance and triumph, race, poverty and deep friendship between the unlikeliest people. There had been many books published about Henrietta’s cells, but nothing about Henrietta’s personality, experiences, feeling, life style etc.

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743 Words | 3 Pages

Her doctor collected cancerous cells and healthy cells from her cervix and gave them to the cancer researcher, George Otto Gey, who was trying to keep cells alive for more than a couple days. Henrietta endured intense radium treatments, but she still died at the age of 31, leaving her husband and five children behind. An amazing discovery was made Henrietta’s cell were immortal. Racism is prevalent in this book through the limited availability of healthcare, unethical behaviors of the doctors, and how racism affected her family. During this time, there was an extensive lack of medical care for colored people.

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She had five children when she fell ill and was devastated to learn her radium treatments left her unable to have more. She was protective of her family’s feelings, by keeping her cancer a secret from them so as not to worry them. Her family described her as an outgoing and beautiful woman of God. Henrietta and I have very little in common. I’ve never experienced prejudice because of my skin color or lived in a

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462 Words | 2 Pages

The origination of HeLa cells, used in biomedical research for a potential cure for cancer, had made many ground breaking discoveries in science; all thanks to one woman, Mrs. Henrietta Lacks. The history of Mrs. Lacks’s contribution to these studies raised many ethical issues concerning healthcare practice. In the short film, The Way of All Flesh, we learn how these cells were revealed by direct violation of ethical principles. During the 1950s, matters regarding informed consent practices were in their beginning stages of implementation.

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