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+Reading journal post about the different genres in which the story is
+ told, using your free write from Exercise I in the lecture on The
+ Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. You can discuss the book, the Nature
+ article, the timeline, or the movie. You do not have to include all
+ the genres but try to discuss at least two. Make sure to include
+ images.
+
+# HeLa and Henrietta
+
+Henrietta Lacks lived from 1920 to 1951, but her cells are still around.
+Rebecca Skloot's *The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks* is a personal
+and scientific history, keeping the focus away from a direct moral
+argument.
+In her telling of the personal effect on the Lacks and of Henrietta's
+life, she treats the family's stories very centrally.
+Skloot narrates the Lacks family's concerns and beliefs about the case
+in terms of her interviews with them.
+She characterizes the family as wronged and still bitter, largely
+because they've been kept in the dark about what Henrietta's cells were
+doing, how they had been taken (including the mere fact that they had
+been taken), or even what the cells were.
+She also includes a narrative about the breakthroughs that HeLa has
+helped with---developing this dilemma between the wrongs perpetrated
+against the Lacks with the wider benefits.
+The merging of the the personal and impersonal medical narratives lets
+the dichotomy exist without being exactly resolved.
+It also plays to much of the honoring of Henrietta's memory---as her
+children and Skloot want to do, memorializing Lacks's life and death.
+
+[IMAGE: Timeline of HeLa's story from Henrietta's birth in 1920 to 2013.
+CAPTION: A medical---and thus much less personal---timeline of HeLa's
+life. Released under CC BY-2.0 by National Human Genome Research
+Institute (NHGRI). SRC: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
+File:Henrietta_Lacks_(HeLa)_Timeline_(26453304954).jpg]
+
+This timeline, on the other hand, is not a memorial to Henrietta's life.
+It informs the viewer of Henrietta's life's milestones and the fact that
+she didn't give consent to have her cells taken, but it doesn't focus on
+that fact.
+The timeline is a medical history reference, so unlike the book or [this
+Nature article](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02494-z), it
+does not focus on the morality of the situation or points of view from
+Henrietta's family.
+Instead, it focuses on the scientific results, especially in the blurb
+above the chronological timeline.
+This shows a bias towards researchers and those achievements, so the
+authors more probably believe that the value derived from her cells
+should be celebrated.
+
+[IMAGE: Logarithmic graph of the exponentially decreasing cost of genome
+sequencing. CAPTION: It is becoming exceedingly cheap to fully sequence
+a genome, so a group of researchers decided to sequence HeLa's
+(Henrietta Lacks's) genome, receiving backlash from her family and the
+broader public. SRC: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
+File:Cost_per_Genome.png]
+
+The Nature article proposes that the practice of taking cells without
+consent (or doing other things) should be banned.
+It structures the argument around Henrietta's personal story, using her
+innate rights to argue that patients like her (and by extension their
+families) deserve to have control over their cells.
+Its focus is on the opposite spectrum from the timeline, dampening the
+scientific achievements to highlight the ethical argument instead.