The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

In her narration, Rebecca introduces Deborah Lacks who is Henrietta’s daughter, a vital figure in the narration. Skloot takes the audience to a journey through history. This paper will be a reflection of the book, it will explain each topic in contrast information as well as impression throughout the book. How do you view scientific research’s impact on the general republic Scientific research is a dynamic field that will keep on evolving through beliefs, norms, and discoveries. From The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca narrates that when Henrietta fell sick, she sort to seek medical attention at Johns Hopkins Hospital but was not treated the first time as doctors told her she was fine. The law gives a patient an option to air out their opinion on the treatment that will be done on them and also if there are comfortable in donating any of their body parts for an experiment.

One part of the narration is that her tissues were progressing in a positive way in the experiment but her health was declining at an alarming rate. Any normal person may think or assume that the doctors were more concern with coming up with a successful experiment rather than focusing their full attention on Henrietta. A significant proof to my statement is that Rebecca narrates in her book that in 1951, Dr. Gey was busy publicizing HeLa and was sending samples researchers across the world but was unable to make any profit. As seen earlier, racism and discrimination against African American people were evident in the Johns Hopkins hospital. This kind of an unethical practice in medical research was normal to the doctors and staff at the hospital.

However, international human rights have shown that every individual regardless of their race, color, or gender has the right to receive utmost medical care within their reach. This basically means that everyone is entitled to receive proper medical attention without any form of discrimination. It was unethical that ‘colored’ people received medical care at separate wards to ‘white’ people. In my own opinion, this is a dilemma and if I was in the same condition, it would have been hard to choose any course of decision because at one part, they would have invaded the privacy of my mother and it is unethical to do so. On the other hand, their invasion of privacy helped in the evolution of medical research.