Deborah Lacks Thesis

Henrietta’s younger daughter, Deborah learned many things about her mother when she was confronted by Rebecca Skloot who was doing research on Henrietta’s life and treatment when she was sick. She read a book about HeLa cells and it mentioned her mother and her death. Deborah also managed to get ahold of Henrietta’s medical records and through those, she found her older sister, Elsie’s, location, but came to find out that she had passed away. Deborah learned that her mother’s cells were being cloned. One of the relieving facts that Deborah was told was that the cancer was not heritable and it was unlikely

Rebecca Skloot, however, used a different perspective in her portrayal of Lacks. This is evident in the way in which she conducted her research and the way she wrote the book. Skloot’s book, The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks, included both the “scientific element concerns the origin and the subsequent uses of the HeLa cell line of cultured cancer cells” (Harper, 2011, p. 463) and the social and

Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s youngest daughter, is an important character as she establishes herself as a prominent feature in Skloot’s story as she symbolizes the Lacks family in their learning of the HeLa cells and the immense betrayal the family experiences as a result. George Gey was the scientist at John Hopkins University who had harvested Henrietta’s cells and developed the techniques to grow her cells in a laboratory. Then there are Lawrence, Sonny, and Zakariyya, the three sons of Henrietta, who collectively are important in the story as they provide their opinions and viewpoints that are vital in understanding the story of Henrietta Lacks’ life and how it resulted that her cells spread and were developed. David “Day” Lacks is Henrietta’s husband, and also cousin, that is important to the story in his contributions to the story of Henrietta’s

She grew up without a mother because she died when Deborah was just one year old and her fifteen year old sister, Elsie, who died in a mentally ill hospital. Her mother’s cells were being tested on constantly and you know she didn’t feel too great when they were infected with viruses and sent up to outer space. The family also got nothing from Henrietta’s cells being tested all time from the scientists. Let’s just say that Deborah was probably nothing but frustrated and sad while the scientists used her mother’s cells to test different things out because it just made her think of her mother that she never knew and the fact that they were using Henrietta’s cells by hurting them

Deborah Lacks was born on November 5th 1949, and was Henrietta and Day’s fourth child. She didn’t remember much about her mother because she died when Deborah was four. Still without even knowing her mother, Deborah Lacks never appreciated the unfairness her family had to go through because of the doctors at John Hopkins Hospital. She more than any member of Henrietta’s family, was angered by the unfairness. Skloot interviewed Deborah for a whole year, but it took a long time to gain her trust. She told Skloot she did not want to get rich, but she wished she had health insurance to pay for the drugs she took that her mother’s cells probably helped make. Deborah died in her sleep in 2009; she was 60 years

The resulting book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, combines the story of the HeLa cells with that of Henrietta and her family. Skloot works hard to gain the trust of the Lacks family, who were angry and distressed about HeLa and the way in which they had been treated. No one had ever explained to them what HeLa was and what it was used for; they struggled to reconcile the immortal existence of their mother’s cells with their own religious beliefs; they have had experiences of being misled and patronized by scientists and other people trying to exploit them; and some members of the family, who live in poverty and cannot afford health insurance, feel that they are entitled to a share of the vast profits that HeLa has made. Over several years, Skloot forms a relationship with the Lacks family, who begin to realize that she is not trying to exploit them. She becomes particularly close to Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, who desperately wants to learn everything she can about the mother who died when she was just a toddler. Deborah also wants her mother’s story to be

In the second section, Skloot tells the story of Henrietta’s death with quotes from multiple perspectives in order to establish her as a human, rather than just the origin of the HeLa cells. Chapters with historical context tell the story of cancer research when it first began to emerge, and begins to connect those events to Henrietta Lacks. In this section, the author’s research and interviews with the Lacks family are introduced much more often to start the transition from the topic of Henrietta’s life to the bigger picture, her importance to medical/scientific ethics. The final, and longest chapter concludes the book with the many legacies Henrietta left behind, not only for research, but also her family and humanitarian issues with ethics and

In expressing the power of privilege, Skloot talks about race, poverty, and the powerlessness that come from the absence of education. She discusses scientific ambition that Henrietta’s cells used to treat basic flu and cancers. The goal of taking the cells was

Out of the numerous recurring themes throughout the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, two themes stood out to me. Those themes showed that there are several characters that are searching for answers or struggling to come to terms with their emotions. Two characters have a particularly difficult time with one of these two themes. The first being Deborah Lacks, the daughter of Henrietta Lacks, she is searching for answers pertaining to her mentally challenged and deceased aunt, Elsie. Deborah starts her quest at the mental hospital where Elsie was living at “Nineteen fifty-five was the year they killed her..I want them records..I know it wasn’t good..why else would they get rid of them?” (Skloot 269). Deborah is obviously upset by

The Henrietta Lacks Foundation is a non-profit organization founded by Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, who is donating a portion of her book’s proceeds to the Foundation. Henrietta was a poor black farmer whose cancer cells had damaging consequences for her family who today can’t afford access to the health care advances their mother’s cells helped make possible. The Foundation strives to provide financial assistance to needy individuals who have made important contributions to scientific research without personally benefiting from those contributions, particularly those used in research without their knowledge or consent. The Foundation gives those who

Henrietta Lacks was a poor African American that became one of the most vital tools in developing medicines like polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and much more. She was a loving mother of five, wife, sister, and friend to many that was taken on October 4, 1951 at the age of thirty-one to cervical cancer. Henrietta’s cells were taken without her knowledge to develop the first ever immortal line of cells.

Rebecca Skloot’s bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, begins with a quote from World War II concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel, “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own source of anguish” (Wiesel qtd. in Skloot n. pag.). This quote serves as a preview of the book and its underlying moral purposes, as Henrietta Lacks and her family are continually treated as objects without rights to their privacy and without regards to their worth or feelings. The dehumanization of the Lacks family by the media and scientific community not only resulted in consequences for the family, but influenced society, as well.

The non-fiction book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebecca Skloot, details the happenings and life of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman and tobacco farmer who became a medical miracle in the 1950’s. The book is written in an attempt to chronicle both the experiences and tribulations of Henrietta Lacks and her family, as well as the events that led to, and resulted from, research done on Henrietta Lacks’ cells. Henrietta was a very average African American woman in this period; she had only a seventh-grade level education, and followed traditional racial and gender roles by spending her time has a mother and caretaker, as well as working on farms throughout her life until the involvement of the US in World War II brought her and her husband, “Day” Lacks, comparatively better work opportunities in industrial steel mills. However, after her death in 1951 Henrietta became much more than average to doctors at John Hopkins when the discovered that cells extracted from her cancerous tissue continued to live and grow much longer than any other tissue samples. Further investigation and isolation of these thriving cells led to the creation of the first ever immortal human cell line in medical history. The incredible progress in medicine made possible by Henrietta Lack’s tissue cells were not without downfalls, though. The treatments and experiences received by Henrietta and the effects it had on her and her family demonstrate both racial and gender

Have you ever been bullied or even discriminated against? Imagine that feeling of embarrassment, shame, and self-consciousness. Although I never have experienced the type of discrimination that Henrietta did, I still understand how it feels whenever you feel cheated because of another's actions and the pain that comes with self-doubt as a affect from the society. Seeing how I am affected by discrimination, it is easy to see that the theme of discrimination in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" is relevant in today's world.

Henrietta Lacks is not a common household name, yet in the scientific and medical world it has become one of the most important and talked names of the century. Up until the time that this book was written, very few people knew of Henrietta Lacks and how her cells contributed to modern science, but Rebecca Skloot aimed to change this. Eventually Skloot was able to reach Henrietta’s remaining family and through them she was able to tell the story of not only the importance of the HeLa cells but also Henrietta’s life.