Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Analysis

Words: 1244
Pages: 5

In the novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, author Rebecca Skloot writes of her discoveries involving the late Henrietta Lacks, her background, her family, her medical history, and how this woman’s cells became a legacy in the name of science, also known as HeLa. Skloot tells of every aspect of Henrietta’s life and how the experimentation of her harvested tissue was an epidemic across the globe due to it’s immortality. Although the information at hand was very difficult for the journalist to get her hands on, medical records, old documents, documentaries, newspapers, and first-hand accounts all contributed to the bringing together of this book to honor Henrietta and her unknowing contribution to the medical and scientific community.
In brief, this novel follows the extensive path of Henrietta’s life from growing up as a poor tobacco farmer, through the raising of her own family until the diagnosis of cervix cancer at the age of 31, in which her death soon
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From the very beginning, the hardships of the family revolved around the trust of each other, and when the trust is broken, the family ultimately begins to collapse through the rest of the accounts in the novel. When Rebecca interferes with their impoverished life, they believe her to be just another person in it for the money, money from immortal HeLa cells, and money from the suffering story behind them. She earns their trust by proving to them that she is there to help, and to spread the knowledge of the woman behind the ever-famous HeLa cells, and they accept her also by the means that God and Henrietta, who are watching over their family, brought her to them for those very