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1. Who wrote The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and what year was it
published?
Rebecca Skloot wrote and published it in 2010.
2. What hospital treated Henrietta Lacks?
Johns Hopkins treated Henrietta Lacks.
3. What are HeLa cells?
HeLa cells are the "immortal cell line" derived from Henrietta's
cervical cancer. They are immortal because they can reproduce without
becoming "senescent."
4. What year did Henrietta Lacks pass away?
Henrietta Lacks passed away in 1951.
5. What genre is this book? (Hint: it's not novel)
This is a cultural history.
6. Who was the first person to culture the HeLa cells?
George Gey was the first to culture it, but the Tuskegee Institute was
the first to mass produce it.
7. What is the ethical dilemma the author lays out?
The author contrasts the widespread medical benefits and opportunities
given by Henrietta's immortal cell line with the Lacks family's
condition.
8. What concepts or themes from other readings appear in The Immortal
Life of Henrietta Lacks?
Medical Apartheid's history of black people's distrust of medicine, both
explicitly in the segment with Bobetta Lacks talking about doctors
grabbing people and implicitly in the ethical dilemma and in how the
doctors hid information from her family.
9. What medical innovations have the HeLa cells made possible? Why?
HeLa cells have improved research practices and made possible many new
tests on in vitro tissue for medical therapies like the polio vaccine.
The primary reason is that the HeLa cells reproduce consistently but are
susceptible to disease like a normal human cell, so vaccines can be
trialed against cells to be infected and get comparable results in
vitro. They have also developed general tissue research practices like
freezing cells or controlled somatic cell fusion because HeLa cells are
abundant enough to try out these possibly damaging techniques. This has
allowed innovation like corneal transplants
10. If health describes rules, regulations, and norms that contribute to
physical and mental wellness, what insights does The Immortal Life of
Henrietta Lacks make about "health?" Please use direct quotations.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks describes a transformation in
medical research ethics to benefit patients' and subjects' health
outcomes. Skloot compares the Lacks family's injustice with other
unethical experiments to establish the active role research subjects
should take in these projects. Lawrence Lacks summarizes their personal
injustice well with, "If our mother so important to science, why can't
we get health insurance?" (168) They have been kept in the dark on their
mother, helped by the fact that they didn't inform Henrietta either.
Skloot is arguing for the development of standards like legal standing
of the Nuremberg Code as established by Southam's unethical experiments.
Southam's injections of cancer into unconsenting subjects is described
as "illegal, immoral, and deplorable," and "this case brought about one
of the largest research oversight changes in the history of
experimentation on humans" (135) because the ethics of research
corresponds are the rules and norms that control patients' physical and
mental wellness.
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