Sajeda Ahmad March.13.

17 
 
From The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks 
 
Who was Henrietta Lacks? Henrietta Lacks was an African American women who 
was the progenitor of the HeLa cell line, one of the most important cell lines in medical 
research ever discovered. Which simply means that doctors have taken her cells to 
research on and later on recognized those cells were immortal, meaning long-living. She 
was born on August 1, 1920 and died in 1951 at a young age because she had cervical 
cancer. The text “From The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” was written by Rebecca Skloot 
to show the experience of Henrietta and her family’s life through HeLa cells importance. 
The central idea of this text is how doctors and medical researchers should give patients 
informed consent to make sure they are fully aware of procedures and understand what 
they are consenting to.  
 
The central idea of patients having the need to consent to procedures and 
understand about what will be going on is shown in the text by showing how not everyone 
is aware of what is going on through the medical assistance and procedures at John 
Hopkins hospital and what happens with Henrietta and her cells. For example, in the text it 
states “Henrietta went straight to the admissions desk and told the receptionist she was 
there for her treatment. Then she signed a form with the words ​operation permit​ at the top 
of the page. It said: ​I hereby give consent to the staff of The John Hopkins Hospital to perform 
any operative procedures under any anaesthetic either local or general that they may deem 
necessary in the proper surgical care and treatment of…​”(page 31) This shows that Henrietta 
gave consent to the doctors for making procedures on her to cure her, but the consent form 
never said that they would be removing cells from her while in a procedure, to experiment 
on. This goes back to the central idea because Henrietta was not fully aware of what 
doctors will be doing to her while she is under an anaesthetic procedures, she was not 
given consent. 
 
Another example from the text would be “I didn’t sign no papers, I just told them they 
could do a topsy. Nothin else. Them doctors never said nuthin about keepin her alive in no 
tubes or growin no cells. All they told me was they wanted to do a topsy see if they could 
help my children. And I’ve always just knowed this much: they is the doctor, and you got to 
go by what they say. I don’t know as much as they do. And them doctors said if I gave em 
my old lady, they could use her to study that cancer and maybe help my children, my 
grandchildren.”(page 164) This evidence shows that Day (Henrietta’s husband) did not 
consent any doctors to remove any cells from, he was not told so either, he was only 
assured that they would only do a topsy on her to see if it will affect her children and future 
grandchildren. This supports the central idea of the text by showing that doctors did not 
give full awareness to Henrietta’s family about her cells being taken by them. Her family 
was only notified that they would do a topsy on her. 
 One last example that is stated in the text is “ In 1969, a Hopkins researcher used 
blood samples from more than 7,000 neighborhood children -- most of them from poor 
black families -- to look for a genetic predisposition to criminal behavior. The researcher 
didn’t get consent.” (page 167) This example shows that a researcher, from the same 
hospital Henrietta went to, took blood samples from children of poor black families, and did 
not get consent to research on their blood samples. This supports the central idea because 
it is not just Henrietta and her family who was dealing with lack of informed consent issue, it 
was also about 7,000 other black children from families who have dealt with the issue as 
well. This shows that John Hopkins hospital does not give consent to many people about 
their researches and procedures, and that families did not agree to give consent because 
they were never asked. 
 
In conclusion, the issue is that doctors and medical researchers should give patients 
informed consent to make sure they are fully aware of procedures and understand what 
they are consenting to. This relates to an ethical dilemma of mainly informed consent, 
because informed consent is what doctors are supposed to tell their patients, which there 
has been a lack of such at John Hopkins’. This issue also has to deal with racial 
discrimination, because researchers were only using blacks as medical research. And also 
human experimentation, because patients were being used as experiments while not 
knowing most of the time because of the lack of knowing what is going on.