The Immortal HeLa Cells of Henrietta

Rebecca Skloot begins the book with the following quote from Elie Wiesel: “We must not see any person as an abstraction.

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Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.” Elie Wiesel was a Jewish writer born in the year 1928, and was a victim of the Holocaust. He stresses that we should never see a human as an abstraction, and his years living through the Holocaust gave him the experience of seeing humans being treated as something other than human.

When you see someone as not human, or less human than yourself it leads to taking advantage of that person. In the book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” written by Rebecca Skloot, Henrietta Lacks is the one being exploited by the doctors and later on she is exploited in a large medical field, and each person views her as an abstraction. Skloot uses this quote to develop her perspective.

When a doctor got ahold of these cells, the importance of keeping the cells for repeated use was necessary. So, in order to keep the cells from the dying, “The Geys were determined to grow the first immortal human cells: a continuously dividing line of cells all descended from one original sample, cells that would constantly replenish themselves and never die.” (Skloot 30). Gey needed to succeed in finding a way to duplicate the original sample of cells so that the cells could be used for years of continuous use.

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This development allowed scientists to see how the human body would react on the cellular level without using actual humans. During this, the doctors never asked Henrietta if it was okay to use her cells for these experiments. They believed, “that since patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment” (Skloot 30). Today this would be frowned upon because using anything from patients without asking them is very illegal. An example in current times is whether you choose to be an organ donor or not on your license, and if you choose not to be the hospital would not be able to take that right away.

Skloot wants us to understand the fortune of George Gey's discovery of HeLa cells at this moment in medical research history: the knowledge of viral mechanisms was just emerging, but there was so much more to learn. “In the early fifties, scientists were just beginning to understand viruses, so as Henrietta's cells arrived in labs around the country, researchers began exposing them to viruses of all kinds—herpes, measles, mumps, fowl pox, equine encephalitis--to study how each one entered cells, reproduced, and spread.” (Skloot 98). It was helpful that HeLa cells were so easy to grow in culture when there was such an enormous demand for them. The cells would later on result in many vaccinations that are still used to this day. During the testings, the doctors had no sense that there was anything wrong with just taking Henrietta’s cells. The medical fields had lost 'Their sense of reality…Human beings were not human beings in their eyes. They were abstractions.' (Skloot ix). This lead to the exploitation of Henrietta’s cells.

Skloot explains that individual cells in a single body, while similar, make their own proteins and behave differently. Later, “Scientists wanted to grow cellular clones—lines of cells descended from individual cells—so they could harness those unique traits. With HeLa, a group of scientists in Colorado succeeded, and soon the world of science had not only HeLa but also its hundreds, then thousands, of clones”(Skloot 100). It was important for scientists to be able to isolate desirable traits and copy them for future use. But cellular cloning is a different thing than making a copy of a complete human being. The confusion over this led Deborah to suffer a lot of anxiety about the 'cloning' of her mother. The lasting impact and despair on her daughter showed that the scientists did not care about the effects of Henrietta’s family.

Seeing humans as abstractions resulted in the consequence of not making the family from which the cells originated honored. Scientists conducted many studies using the HeLa cells, and this resulted in the discoveries of many vaccines developed to fight harmful diseases. The cells only remained as a well-known name in the science labs when the family should get credit for contributing immensely to these developments. The family also lived in poverty when they could have been compensated by the scientific community for the continous use of their family member’s cells. Similar cases were mentioned throughout the book about families having samples secretly taken away for research, and these families would file a lawsuit and end up losing. This raised concerns for many people because when going to the doctor, no one knows if they are going to keep samples or not.

Rebecca Skloot’s different perspective is evident in the way she wrote the book. This book shows her concern for people who contribute to scientific research, and also is for any age, class, or gender of person. She traveled to many different places to receive the research needed to support her viewpoint. Her goal was to bring the problem into light, and she promised Henrietta Lacks’ daughter Deborah that all the proceeds she made from publishing the book she would use to sponsor her family’s descendants because they were all suffering from poverty. Rebecca viewed the family as significant to the scientific community.

Overall, this book written by Rebecca Skloot is very empowering and draws awareness to the family of Henrietta Lacks. They are victims of the medical community because they never got credit for the use of Henrietta’s cells. The family has dealt with great poverty and Rebecca Skloot wishes to use this book to help them receive profit from being the reason there are many vaccines that we still use today.

Updated: Aug 17, 2022
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The Immortal HeLa Cells of Henrietta. (2022, Feb 10). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-immortal-hela-cells-of-henrietta-essay

The Immortal HeLa Cells of Henrietta essay
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