Henrietta Lacks Research Paper

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Pages: 4

Henrietta Lacks was born in Roanoke, Virginia, on August 1, 1920. Henrietta had eight siblings, and unfortunately his mother, Eliza Lacks Pleasant, died when she was giving birth to her tenth child. Johnny Pleasant, Henrietta's father did not have the patience to raising all children, He took the decision to return to Clover, Virginia where his family worked in the tobacco plantations. Johnny distributed his children with his family and Henrietta stayed with her grandfather Tommy Lacks. In her childhood Henrietta lived with her grandfather and her cousin Davis Lacks (Day). Some of the activities that Henrietta made was to work on the plantation, went to school (only, to sixth grade), and took care of the animals, played with his cousins, sometimes …show more content…
Henrietta felt a knot in her womb. So, she decided to go with his local doctor, but he did not find anything. Then, she went to Hopkins hospital, that was for sick, poor people and most of the patients were black people who could not pay for their medical bill. Also, this hospital had bathrooms, rooms, and separate fountains, one for blacks and one for whites. When Dr. Howard Jones arrived, he asked her several questions and then he examined her. Jones found was a “lump of the size of a nickel, shiny and purple”, he had never seen anything like that, the doctor took a sample to send it to analyze it in the …show more content…
The samples were taken to the laboratory, the staff thought that those cells would also die the same as the old ones. Unfortunately, the tumor did not respond well to treatment and Henrietta died of cervical cancer in October 1951, when she was 31 years old. The most surprising thing was that Gey discovered that cells from part of his tumor could grow in the laboratory. This was what he had sought for so many years. Gey gave it the name of HeLa, by the two initials of Henrietta Lack's first and last name. Henrietta cells reproduced every 24 hours, and never stopped doing