![]() The racial and social divide between the Hopkins staff and the Lacks family allowed the Hopkins staff to withhold important information from them. Additionally, no one thought to tell Henrietta afterwards what George Gey had discovered about her special tissues. This is what made Henrietta so vulnerable in the Hopkins setting. Skloot describes this as a time of “benevolent deception” (63), where doctors withheld information from patients and patients didn’t question doctors, especially when the doctors were white and the patients were black. Even if he had, Henrietta would not have been able to say no. She was a black, lower-class woman and for this reason Richard TeLinde did not ask her permission to take her tissues. Because of this racial and social divide (or one might say injustice) and because of how she was treated, Henrietta did not have much of a choice. She was taken to a “colored-only” operating room at the hospital that she had driven twenty miles to get to because it was the closest hospital that would treat black people (32, 15). In 1951, at Hopkins, when Henrietta received treatment, the doctors, nurses, and technicians were white (31). Second, because of her racial and socio-economic status, Henrietta was vulnerable and may have felt she didn’t have much of a choice when it came to giving consent. Henrietta’s tissues were taken, but not for the purpose of treating her cancer (as it had already been diagnosed and she was about to begin radium treatments). First, the form that Henrietta signed at John Hopkins gave permission for her doctors to “perform any operative procedures…that they deem necessary in the proper surgical care and treatment of _,” (Skloot, Immortal, pg. ![]() There are many reasons that Henrietta Lacks did not give informed consent. It also includes understanding what one’s tissues could be used for and understanding that one may not be entitled to compensation even if one’s tissues help research something that results in monetary gain by another party. From my understanding of informed consent from Immortal, this is when one understands the risks and benefits of what one is consenting to. From Immortal, exploitation by the doctors is explained as doctors doing unnecessary and invasive procedures on vulnerable patients, denying patients proper information, and/or denying patients the opportunity to give informed consent. The doctors at John Hopkins, specifically Richard TeLinde and George Gey, exploited Henrietta by taking her cells, growing them, and giving them away without letting her give informed consent. Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks explores these issues, without taking advantage of them herself. However because of their race and socio-economic status, Henrietta Lacks and the rest of the Lacks family were exploited by doctors, researchers, and the media. After she died, these cells, known as HeLa cells, became essential to scientific research, contributing to developments like vaccines and other medical advancements. Without asking or informing her, Henrietta’s doctors at John Hopkins took tissue samples from her cervix and attempted to grow them and keep them alive. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer. “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” does a reasonably interesting job of exploring the fraught relationship between Deborah Lacks and Rebecca Skloot (Rose Byrne), the freelance science writer determined to tell her mother’s story in what became the best-selling book of the same name.Paper 2: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks : Exploring Rhetoric Somewhere between these two poles lies a third attraction. The worst reason to watch “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” is because you crave a detailed exploration of what Johns Hopkins University, which harvested Henrietta Lacks’s cells without her consent, did to her and subsequently to her family, because the film explores these crucial subjects mostly through montage and exposition. As Deborah Lacks, she’s alternately haunted by the premature death of her mother and the misery that flowed from Henrietta’s passing, and ferociously driven to understand what happened after cells taken from her mother’s cervical cancer became the key to a huge range of medical breakthroughs. The best reason to watch “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” which aired on HBO this weekend, is to be reminded what a tremendous actor Oprah Winfrey is.
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