PBH 205 Reflection paper 2

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Reflection paper #2
PBH 205
Mary Anderson
September 24, 2014

Anderson 1
Mary Anderson
PBH 205
Professor Bungum
September 24, 2014
Reflection #2 In these next few chapters of the book, I found out a lot more to the whole story then I thought I would. Already learning from the previous chapters how Henrietta was affected by this disease she had and seeing how the doctors and specialist were handling it, they now started to talk about the after math and what benefit Henrietta Lacks body was for the future of health. During these chapters she had passed away but the researchers still wanted to do research on the cells that had formed in her body and they wanted to find a cure for this epidemic that had taken over Henrietta’s body. The main point of the second half of this story was mainly that they wanted to use Henrietta’s story to help people in the future and also wanted to keep her cells from her tumor disease to help them figure out how to cure this. When Henrietta passed they did a biopsy on her to find out what was going on yet again, and to take the cells that were still alive in her body and they wanted to freeze them so they could later do experiments on them. There was a huge epidemic of polio in this time of year and Henrietta’s cells opened a lot of doors to help stop this quicker. Anderson 2
Some things I found interesting during this part of the story was how ruthless the doctor/researchers were. First Southam had taken Henrietta’s cells and wanted to freeze them so later on he could do experiments with them to help cure this disease. He then asked for volunteers and he got about 120 for his experiments to test out the disease from Henrietta’s body and see what cells do what and how they grow on other people. He injected his volunteers with these HeLa cells and didn’t tell his volunteers that they were cancer cells, which really made them, mad although he didn’t technically have to tell them at all. Something interesting I found was that when he injected his volunteers they would get the reaction from the cells, but as time went on their immune systems started to fight off the disease itself. This really struck me and had me excited to think that just one person had to unfortunately take one for the team and get sick with this terrible disease, but now today it helped us find the answers to