Rebecca Skloot Essay

Words: 1791
Pages: 8

Hear the screaming Aaaaaaah! Aaaaaaah! The pain is emotionally paralyzing but physically taking over every element of her body as Henrietta Lacks jumps and rocks rapidly from the pain moving through her tumor filled body. Being strapped down and being made a prisoner of her hospital bed was the only way to keep Mrs. Lacks from falling to the floor until her body had a filling of morphine. The pearls of cancer with in her made a permanent signature in her body promising to live on forever.
Baseball sized growths almost took over her kidneys, ovaries and uterus. There were tumors present in her lungs and diaphragm. The cancer was so lethal in her intestines that it caused her bowels to jam up, making Henrietta look as if she was pregnant.
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Previously Skloot was an instructor teaching creative writing and science journalism for the University of Memphis, New York University and the University of Pittsburgh. The author has also worked for NPR’s Radiolab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The Oprah Magazine, Discover and O. She was chosen as one of five leaders of 2010 by Washington Post and she coedited The Best American Science Writing 2011. Skloot is the founder and president of The Henrietta Lacks Foundation which provides grants to Henrietta’s immediate family for educational and health care cost. Her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks became a New York Times bestseller, has been made into an HBO film and chosen as best book of 2010 by Entertainment Weekly, People and New York Times.
Rebecca Skloot wrote this book to inform readers about the contributions of HeLa cells to science and the life of Henrietta Lacks and her family. The details of her family is mentioned all the way back from slavery to the status of how her family is doing today. Readers of this book are introduced to several members of the Lacks’ family and you get to learn about them as adults, their childhood and other characters that come along in the book such as the crooked Sir Lord Keenan Kester Cofield and honorable people like Roland