Short Essay

[Name of the Writer]

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[Date]

Short Essay

Racism and ethnicity have hunted many black people as whites even in the scientific studies and it is also known that the world has not acknowledged the struggle and the effort of the black African Americans. The writer of the story "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks " has always been obsessed with the African American female patient whose cancer cells were taken out and harvested without even telling her or her family and then they were used to create an immortal cell line for scientific experimentation. As there is not enough information about Henrietta and her family, therefore, Skloot tries to tell their story in this book. Until she started to contact her family she could not realize how much emotional baggage and backstory exists and linked with their lives (HeLa Cella).

When Skloot tried to communicate with the family then it turned out that the entire family was very hostile about the idea of speaking to yet another media person about their mother or wife famous HeLa cells. She learns quickly that how badly this particular family was treated by the media and also by the scientific community, therefore, she has to gain their trust badly before she was allowed by them to tell their stories.

Later she came to know that Henrietta was a 30 years woman who went to Johns Hopkins Hospitals in order to seek help for a knot on her cervix. Once she went to the hospital she was diagnosed with cervical cancer and then she was treated with X-ray therapy and radium.

In this entire process Skloot also raised the ethical issue that while treating cancer the hospital administration without even informing the patient or the family removed some tissues from her tumor and then it was sent for culture,. The family was not informed even at that time when the hospital administration and scientific community realized that a breakthrough has occurred because the rate at which the cells were multiplying was amazing.

In the process of telling the story about Henrietta's life, the authors tell the story about the unethical scientific experimentation on human subjects and how there is no such law in order to keep up with such atrocities. While narrating the story she also touches some part of the Tuskegee syphilis status and also the night doctors who forcefully chose some black males and females to do experiments on them (Skloot).

Although in general Skloot is a science reporter who was generally quite excited about the scientific breakthroughs but in this particular case, she paints the picture of scientific and medical communities as corrupted by racism and also the objectification of the research objects and patients. Although she cannot force the entire community to pay back to the family for the damage ultimately she made them realize to acknowledge the patient and her family (Deal done over HeLa cell line).

Through this Skloot demonstrates that there are not only one or two cases where racism and ethnicity dominated the scientific researches but there are various other studies in which black people were forcefully made part of scientific studies and in most of the cases they didn't even know that they are being an experimental object. Skloot narrates " That the HeLa cells are treating various diseases mostly in whites but her family doesn't even have money to survive" (109). This shows that how the lives of the black are worthless and a joke to the white counterparts and all this is narrated quite strongly and beautifully in this story.

Work Cited

“Deal Done over HeLa Cell Line.” Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, www.nature.com/news/deal-done-over-hela-cell-line-1.13511

“HeLa Cells (1951).” British Society for Immunology, www.immunology.org/hela-cells-1951.

Skloot, Rebecca. The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. Broadway Books, 2017.