The central thesis of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is that the American medical industry often exploits and mistreats people who lack education and economic power. This disproportionately affects women and minorities.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a nonfiction book by American science writer Rebecca Skloot (born September 19, 1972). It was published in 2010 to acclaim and remained on the The New York Times Bestseller list for six years. Generically, it is an example of a nonfiction work in which the author's journey to investigate the story is as essential as the putative subject. This is as much of a book about the education of Skloot herself as about the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks. One could argue that a well-developed secondary thesis of the book is that journalists need to develop cultural sensitivity in their interactions with their subjects, understanding not just raw facts but the emotional and cultural circumstances underlying and surrounding the events at hand.
For its central thesis, the book contrasts the medical breakthroughs and successes of the researchers investigating and using Lacks's cells with the poverty and confusion of Lacks herself and her family, who initially neither understood the degree to which Lacks contributed to a scientific breakthrough nor benefited personally from the vast amount of money generated by her cells. The book shines an important spotlight on the ethics of medical research.
As Rebecca Skloot writes in the Prologue to her book, "The story of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells raises important issues regarding science, ethics, race, and class" (page xiv). The main point of the book is that the huge discrepancy between the lives of Henrietta Lacks and her children on one hand and the profits generated by her cells on the other raises questions about the fairness of the way in which her cells have been used in scientific research.
While Henrietta Lacks lived in poverty and faced racial discrimination, even by the medical establishment (she was treated for cervical caner in a clinic for African American people at Johns Hopkins), her cells, harvested for research, went on to be enormously profitable and successful in research in several medical fields. Her family, however, continued to live in poverty, lack health coverage, and be mostly uninformed about what had happened to her. The author's point is that medical science must allow people to make informed choices about what happens to their tissues and that the ethics of this type of research must be openly debated.
Since it is a biography, the central thesis of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is to discover the untold story of Henrietta Lacks. So, first and foremost, it is about Henrietta and her family. Just as central is the issue of how her cells were used without her or her family's knowledge. This story becomes an ethical question of what rights people had/have in how their cells, blood, etc. are used in medical research. It is also a question of race. Had Henrietta been white, it...
See This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial to unlock this answer and thousands more. Enjoy eNotes ad-free and cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
is possible that she would have at least gained some recognition, then or over time, for the contribution her cells continue to provide to cancer research. Rebecca Skloot wrote the book to learn more about Henrietta as well as the medical, personal, and racial issues related to the story. The book has a lot to do with attitudes of race in the 1950s as compared with today. The book also makes the case that citizens should have access to knowledge (and perhaps compensation) for how even parts of their bodies as small as cells are used.
So, there are a lot of issues that emerge as Skloot learns about and shares Henrietta's story. The central thesis is that the book is about the justifiably responsible, ethical and legal reasons to share Henrietta's story with the world. After all, her cells have been used in cancer research centers throughout the world. It is important to note any contribution of such significance. If her cells continue to be used, this would make Henrietta (technically) biologically immortal. Therefore, her story should likewise be remembered even long after her cells cease being reproduced. No other patient in history has given more, physically, to cancer research.
"Henrietta's cells have now been living outside her body for longer than they ever lived inside it," Defler said. If we went to almost any cell culture lab in the world and opened its freezers, he told us, we'd probably find millions -- if not billions -- of Henrietta's cells in small vials on ice. (4)
What is the central argument in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks?
In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot argues that the medical community cannot exploit people to further their research but rather must require informed consent and respect all people who are involved in contributing to their research.
Skloot's argument rests on the case of a woman named Henrietta Lacks. Lacks died from incurable cervical cancer in 1951, and scientists took cells from her cervix without ever asking for consent from her or her surviving family. These cells were sent to scientists all over the world and formed the basis for many scientific studies.
The cells are referred to as HeLa cells—after the woman they came from. Howard Jones and Richard TeLinde, doctors at John Hopkins, took cells from Lacks without asking for permission; doing so wasn't required at that time. They gave those cells to George Gey, a scientist who used them to create the first line of immortal cells in the world.
Still, her family didn't know how her cells had been taken, distributed, and used. All her cousin Day was told was that an autopsy might help protect the family if any of them also ended up having cancer.
The HeLa cells did a lot of good in the world. For example, they were the cells that Jonas Salk used when he needed to test his polio vaccine. Skloot traces the movement of the different HeLa cells through many labs and scientific discoveries. She also explains how the HeLa cells ended up contaminating other cells—which is how the Lacks family finally found out that the cells taken from Henrietta were being used around the world.
Ultimately, Skloot argues that the medical community has a responsibility to its subjects and that informed consent is absolutely necessary and ethical. This is clear both from her description of the use of HeLa cells and from the story of the Lacks family and how many times they were misled or and mistreated by the medical community.
What is the central argument in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks?
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot has several major themes, but not really a single central argument. It starts as a mystery concerning the cell line derived from Henrietta Lacks, who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Skloot was curious about the person behind the cells, and her curiosity was further piqued as she discovered how little had been known or written about the woman whose cells have been so important to science.
In her efforts to uncover the history of Henrietta Lacks, Skloot raises many issues of medical ethics. The first is how much or whether people can be said to own their genetic material. The next has to do with the nature of informed consent, and the way that the standards of informed consent are biased towards the educated middle classes. Another issue she raises is how unequal hierarchies of race, gender, and class play into the everyday practices of the medical community.
What is the central argument in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks?
The central argument of the book is that the scientific community has an ethical obligation to respect the dignity, autonomy, and personhood of all subjects and individuals with whom it comes into contact. Accordingly, individuals cannot be made into subjects of scientific inquiry without their consent. And, when objects of scientific study (including, for example, the physical material scientists use within a labor try setting) are sourced from individual people, those individuals deserve to be made aware of such sourcing, and when possible they ought to be appropriately compensated.