Austin Siu Periods 7&8 Supplemental Reading “Survival of the Sickest” by Dr. Sharon Moalem 1) What prompted the author’s interest in biology? The author’s grandfather was a strong, loving man that loved bleeding. He loved donating blood because it made him feel great both emotionally and physically. The reason behind his physical please from donating blood was because he was diagnosed with hemochromatosis or iron overload disease. Her father passed away early but she was still motivated
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot shows the life of Henrietta and other main characters. The three figures from this story that I chose to write about was Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Sklott, and Deborah Lacks. Three different people but all manage to cross paths some time. The similarities between the three characters I chose are three women, three independent women, three hopeful women, and three strong women. All never gave up on trying to find out more information. All kept
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In 1947, when India got Independence from the British, my great-grandmother was fighting a personal battle with cancer. In those days, medical science offered radium radiation therapy to fight the dreaded disease. When I was a child, over dinner table conversations, dad would share stories of the family’s struggle and sheer helplessness in alleviating the suffering of the aging matriarch. His narrations would be laced with exasperated ‘if only’ and ‘times have changed’, fervently wishing that medical
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in the book, the hospitals in the book, about the development of molecular “probe”, an also bout how Crownsville had black workers now and how that changed the idea of discrimination. In Henrietta Lacks, Henrietta is racially discriminated quite a bit. In the book on page 15 it states, “David drove Henrietta nearly twenty miles to get to Hopkins, not because they preferred it, but because it was the only major
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damaging the physicians and scientists were to Henrietta Lacks. I’m aware that there were no laws protecting her at the time she was ill and being used as an experiment but it demonstrates the way they were biased in getting her consent as well as
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“immortal”? Analyze the various ways that Henrietta and Deborah achieve immortality. Immortality is the ability to live forever, or eternal life. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about Rebecca Skloot’s journey to write a book about Henrietta Lacks and her cervical cells, known as the immortal HeLa cells that were used after her death, without her consent, to advance medical science research. At the end of Skloot’s book she quotes Henrietta Lacks daughter Deborah, “But maybe I’ll come
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In 1954, virologist, Chester Southam, theorized the source of cancer; he believed cancer was caused either by a virus or an insufficiency in the immune system. To test his theories, Southam began injecting unknowing patients with HeLa cells. This research became extremely controversial. Southam was tremendously deceitful about what he was doing. For example, when experimenting on cancer patients, Southam “told them he was testing their immune systems; he said nothing about injecting them with someone’s
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M.D. Sherwin B. Nuland’s “The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis” investigates the Childbed Fever epidemic of the seventeenth century. The author, Dr. Sherwin B.Nuland, was once a world-renowned surgeon who spent one-third of his life practicing medicine, as well as, researching and educating others of his findings (Gellene, 2014, para.1). He meticulously wrote this book to capture the attention and educate curious disease lovers everywhere. The details
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Medical experiments involving human subjects were extremely common throughout the 1900s and in many cases were highly unethical, one of those cases were Henrietta Lacks as well as The Tuskegee Men, also the Nazi Test subjects. Henrietta Lacks was used as a human subject for experiments when her doctors at Johns Hopkins took tissue samples from her cervix without her consent and attempted to grow and keep them alive. After she died of cervical cancer, these cells, known as HeLa cells, became essitenial
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significant disparities in children and adult public healthcare are ethnicity and socioeconomic status. In the novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebecca Skloot, we see how poverty affected the Lacks family. As a result of their ethnicity and financial conditions, Henrietta and her family were not able to access adequate medical care. Henrietta suffered from cervical cancer and sought out medical attention. The best she could afford was to be seen at a research hospital known as
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