"Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tabacco farmer whose cells--taken without her knowledge in 1951--became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more."Welcome to the MORE Program’s book blog. As we read and discuss this year’s One Campus, One Book selection, I welcome all of you to reflect and write about Henrietta’s enduring legacy. Writing helps us convey ideas, solve problems, and understand our changing world and what better way to do this than through Skloot’s story of the HeLa cells. Science, medicine, bioethics, technology, race, class, and gender in America are just a few of the issues that I encourage you to blog about.
In the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebecca Skloot tells a story about the origins of the world famous HeLa cells. Along with learning about HeLa cells and how they were obtained, readers also receive a huge amount of information about Rebecca Skloot’s journey on uncovering the truth about these cells. The book covers many different types of oppression that still exist in today’s society such as ethnicity, class, and gender.
ReplyDeleteOne of the most important aspects in this book is the time frame, mainly because as the story progresses it does not follow a linear time line. However, it is very well paced, well written, and very detailed book. Since most of Henrietta Lacks’ life is told in the early 1900, readers can see how medicine was practiced during that time and how little people knew about cancer. Their treatment for cancer, specifically cervical cancer, was very barbaric and very counter productive due to the doctor’s lack of knowledge about cancer at that time.
Furthermore, another topic that the book covers is ethics and weather it was right to take the HeLa cells from Henrietta without her or her family knowing. One of the biggest questions in this book is that was it ethically correct for doctors to use Henrietta’s cells to make medical advancements, and make billions of money from the cells alone. While on the other hand people who are related to Henrietta can not even afford medical treatment. For instance, Henrietta’s first cousin Cottie who suffers from polio is not being treated due to his financial situation. This was pretty ironic because the vaccine for polio would have not been made without the help of the HeLa cells. This situation is very deceiving for Henrietta’s relatives since they are of a lower class and also are not educated.
The book also puts into focus the ethnicity of Henrietta and Skloot and throughout the book the author tells their stories parallel from each other. This makes it very easy to compare how a white and black individual is treated. She talks about segregation between blacks and whites in terms of education and how they are viewed by society. This is very shocking in today’s society mainly because now schools are very diverse, which is a strong positive characteristic since people are able to view the world in many different ways. A certain student can develop their understanding about another culture nowadays since they are not separated and isolated into different types of ethnic backgrounds. Also more importantly success is not determined by the person’s race but instead they rely heavily on education. Unfortunately, during Henrietta life time she faced much adversity when it came to education because she is a black individual who grew up with a poor family. She grew up in the time where she was unable to better her and her family’s situation because she wasn’t given equal opportunity. Even in an early age she was not given the proper education and she had to work from the start. Also the book questions on how differently she would have been treated for cancer if she was a white woman and if would actually make a difference. On the other hand, Skloot was able to finish school and was very educated about both science and literature. She has her advantages over Henrietta mainly because she was well educated and her class status was much better. This is unfair because people weather white, black, yellow or purple should have equal opportunity in every aspects of life.