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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Essay

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assey Barbeau
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Essay
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway Books, 2010
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is Rebecca Skloot’s debut monograph, and she has only written one other monograph since. Skloot attended Colorado State University, and received her MFA from University of Pittsburgh. Though she has only written two monographs, Skloot is the author of hundreds of essays and stories published in various magazines.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebecca Skloot, tells the story of a young African American woman named Henrietta Lacks, who was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Though she was put through many painful medical treatments, Henrietta Lacks succumbed to her illness at the young age of 31. Unbeknown to Henrietta and her family, surgeons at John Hopkins Hospital had taken tissue from Lacks’ tumor, and sent the cells to be investigated by Dr. Gey, a researcher at John Hopkins Hospital. Despite the fact that many would consider this morally corrupt, informed consent had not yet materialized at this time, so there was no legal wrongdoing on the part of John Hopkins. Much to Dr. Gey’s surprise, Henrietta Lacks’ cells were growing astonishingly …show more content…
The reader gets an inside look at not only the corrupt medical world, but, in general, how poorly minorities were treated. It is not often that a reader comes across a book that covers so many topics that our society still does not like to confront to this day. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks not only brings to light societal problems that we have always dealt with, but also brings to light a person that not many people have heard of, but who drastically changed the course of our

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