Blog #3

Maria Vazquez

Writing Workshop

Blog #3

19 August 2012

Authorship and Authority

In the book by Rebecca Skloot, a journalist, The Life of Henrietta Lacks exist the issue of authorship.  I believe that authorship is part of being a writer because and author is consider someone who has made contributions to a published study; however, I also believe that there is exits ethics in this kind work too. Being a writer and an author may have nothing to do with the tone of the skin, it is about telling a story to the reader.  In my opinion, Rebecca Skloot did a great job in writing this book and she did whatever she needed to tell the story of Henrietta Lack and the legacy of her cells. She spent a lot of her time interacting with Henrietta family in order to figure out the person and the mother behind this HeLa cells.  Moreover, I believe that if she would not have written this book people would know very little if at all about Henrietta Lacks. For example,  I had never heard anything about her not even her immortal cells.

On the other hand, I personally think that Rebecca Skloot went a little too far in matters about the family and forgetting the main focus of the story the women behind the cells.  I believe that she included very personal information about Henrietta’s family especially about Deborah who was very uncomfortable knowing about the cell of her mother.  Skloot talks about the family financial status and how ignorant they were related to the information about Henrietta cell and how people from a research laboratory just took advantage of them in order to take blood from the family to do gene mapping.  I do not know what were Skloot’s intentions in telling these details about the family or even if the family agreed with it. However, she mentioned this on her book which I do not really agree unless this has been in accordance between her and the Lacks Family.

On the other hand, I really enjoy reading the book, but Rebecca should had helped Henrietta’s family by giving some of the profits of her book to the family as a compensation of the great story she wrote about. In addition, it was interesting to know about how research was perform during segregation and how important is being ethnic in what one does. I learned about the history of science, and how people used to perform science in the 1950’s