Thesis: In her novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Skloot uses events from the lives of the Lacks family and examples of medical treatment from the time, to construct and defend the argument that minorities and members of lower socioeconomic statuses receive worse medical treatment than upper and middle class non-minorities and are subjected to exploitation.

Topic Sentence 01: Many medical professionals at the time, had negative attitudes towards non white, uneducated or impoverished peoples. Evidence: “But Carrel wasn’t interested in immortality for the masses. He was a eugenicist: organ transplantation and life extension were ways to preserve what he saw as the superior white race…”(Skloot 59). Commentary: Carrel, a nobel prize …show more content…
That was the bad part...cause I don’t know if they didn’t give us any information because they was making money out of it, or if they was just wanting to keep us in the dark about it.” (Skloot 168). Commentary: The Lacks family knew nothing of the HeLa cells, nor did they make any money off of the billion dollar innovations surrounding them. This was most likely due to Henrietta’s societal position earlier in her life, where Johns Hopkins felt no obligation to inform her of her cell sample because she was in the charitable public ward. The lack of information given to Henrietta, and her unwillingness to vocalize any of her concerns led to the exploitation and suffering of her family. Evidence: “It was like a nightmare. She’d read in the paper about the syphilis study at Tuskegee, which had just been stopped by the government after forty years, and now...Hopkins had part of Henrietta alive and scientists everywhere were doing research on her and the family had no idea.” (Skloot 180). Commentary: Skloot included this scene about Bobette's realization to highlight the parallels of Henrietta’s exploitation with that of the Jews during the Nazi reign, the women of the Mississippi Appendectomies, and other victims of societal