SuperSummary study guides demonstrate an authoritative voice, present expert analysis, offer big picture ideas, and help listeners understand a work’s underlying meanings and conclusions. This African- American woman became the source of many advances in modern medicine. The life of a woman named Henrietta Lacks is presented to the readers. This audio study guide presents the same expert content - written by experienced teachers, professors, and literary scholars - in an easy-to-access audio format. Raul Morales Professor Mooney EnglishB50 M/W am 23 February 2015 Summary: Subtitle In the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by the American author Rebecca Skloot. Skloot's text intertwines a personal family story with an exploration of science, ethics, and racism. These cells became the first human cells to survive in a culture, where they thrived, multiplied, and helped produce major scientific breakthroughs. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a work of nonfiction about a woman who died tragically young and whose cells were taken from her body without her consent. Featured content also includes commentary on major characters, 25 important quotes, essay questions, and discussion topics. This audio study guide for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot includes detailed summary and analysis of each chapter and an in-depth exploration of the book’s multiple symbols, motifs, and themes such as ethics in scientific research, informed consent, and racism in medicine. SuperSummary, a modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, offers high-quality instructional study guides for challenging works of literature. This introduction to the way the legal system in fact worked against rather than for them as well as how the legal system had been powerless to help to define the ways in which the medical community could operate the HeLa project was just further evidence to the family that they were outclassed by a wily system that sought only to exploit their family member for profit and gain while at the same time denying any of the proceeds of such a project. Response: This particular section of the book is of vital importance as it is the part in which the family begins to come to a more full and complete realization of what the HeLa project actually entailed as well as the ways in which the medical community would resort to intimidation and threats of lawsuits in order to keep them quiet and complacent with regards to the injustices that had been done in the past.įor this reason, the author relates a sad story of how lawyers such as Colfield sought to take advantage of the situation and exploit the family while all the time feigning to be pursuing the case out of a mutal shared interest in seeing justice done (Skloot 182). Lastly, the author relates the way in which the legal back and forth between John’s Hopkins and the family served to add even more stress and concern to the family with regards to how they felt they had been manipulated from the very start. A subsequent documentary by the BBC helped to acquaint the family, due to the fact that they were interviewed, regarding precisely what had transpired with the HeLa project. Meanwhile, Deborah continues to research what has happened to her mother and how the cells are being used. Furthermore, the additional children suffered from narcotics abuse and minor run ins with the law. Returning the story to the Lacks family, the author relates how Deborah, Henrietta’s daughter, remarried and Zakariyya was in and out of prison and only able to hold work intermittently. In this way, the story tracks the developments of medical law and the ways in which biological and tissue began to develop a strict set of laws that governed their usage. The author relates the case of an individual who signed a consent form to give up any and all rights to his spleen and the subsequent cells that might be cultured from it. Likewise, the story goes on to discuss the means by which new and developing laws would affect the treatment of an individual’s biological matter both before and after one’s death. Upon a better understanding of precisely what was going on, the family divided between those that sought to understand what specifically was being done to Henrietta’s cells and how and those that wished to be compensated for the large amount of money that had been made from the biological matter that had already been sold by a host of medical labs. When the medical professionals contacted the family to obtain consent to take blood samples in order to track the genetic markers, a Chinese graduate student was employed to do this and was not fully able to transmit the necessary information to the family. Naturally, doing this would mean that the family would come in contact with the researchers as well as the knowledge that Henrietta’s body biological matter was still very much alive and being used for medical research.
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