The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

In the book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", the author, Rebecca Skloot, wants readers to know that that Henrietta Lacks was a woman living in the mid- 1900s was taken advantage of when she had cancer and some of her cells were taken without her knowing and used in experiment in labs eventually around the world.The author explains the distribution of her cells over the world and the importance that they have because of how quickly they can grow and can be used to discover vaccines and answers to many scientific questions. On detail that helps Rebecca Skloot prove her point is when she explains how Henrietta's cells helped make a vaccine for polio. Without even knowing it she saved millions of people from diening of polio. Another detail that helps her is when she goes to interview the family who then explain to her how they didn't know about this untill the scientists took their blood. It shows how if Henrietta's closest family didn't know about the usage of her cells, how was she supposed to know? Rebecca Skloot says in the story after she explains that the reporter used fake names, "This is why the name was never mentioned to them." "Them" being her family. She wants readers to realize how terrible this was for Henrietta when she describes in too much detail what was happening inside her body. Skloot wants readers to realize how unfair this was to Henrietta because she had no idea what was happening to her cells.

Rebecca Slkoot hopes that readers will feel bad for Henrietta and think that what happened to her was unfair. She makes us feel that the doctors and scientists had no right to take her cells without her approval. They didn't even tell her in her life time what was happening and there was no way for her to figure out when she was stuck in the hospital most of the time. The story talks about how her family didn't even find out untill twenty years after it became a multimillion-dollar industry. This tells the reader that they didn't even try to tell her or her family, and this is not fair. She would most likely be happy that her cells were doing so much good to the world, so why didn't they tell her? The author clearly thinks that this is unfair to Henrietta and her family when she has many pages dedicated to the argument over whether informed consent is needed. She says that she asked one of Henrietta's doctors whether they had tried to get informed consent and he said "No. We never gave consent form because you just go

I think that so far, this book is really great and interesting. I had no idea that this sort of thing happened, and before I read this book, I didn't know who Henrietta Lacks was. I feel really bad that that this happens to people and I wonder if this happens to anyone else, and if it does, than those people don't even get a good story to tell; plus they were lied to. It seems unfair, even if this helped the scientific world a lot. I am very interested in cell biology so I am learning a lot about cells that I want to know, while reading a really well written book. The science in the book is amazing. It explains how vaccines are injected into cells and that they can be split in half.