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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.
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