Personal Health Lab - Essay Example

 I think that although much has been made of the fact that the tissue was taken from the patient without her permission, consent has never been required for disposition of tissue obtained from surgery. Placentas, appendices, and other surgical detritus are considered waste material. Generally they are examined by the hospital pathologist and discarded. In some cases such biological by-products have proven useful for medical advances. (Skloot, 22-35)Skloot documents a similar situation in the case of the removal of a California patient’s spleen more than thirty years after the Lacks case.

The issue of financial benefit from Lacks’s cells continues to be raised. Her heirs are the antithesis of a Norman Rockwell American family. Since many of them live at a subsistence level and often without health care, there is considerable irony in the fact that millions of dollars have been made on Lacks’s genetic material. Those who carry her genes have not seen one cent of that windfall. Decades passed before the family even knew of the continued existence of their mother, in her extraordinary cells.

Not only is this famous woman buried in an unmarked grave, but also her family is “unmarked” with the monies her cells have generated. (Skloot, 120-119)One of the incidents Skloot relates concerns her ongoing relationship with Lacks’s youngest daughter, Deborah. When Skloot began her research, Deborah was in her sixties. Deborah’s approach to the revelation about her mother was mixed. On one hand, she had many sober questions about her mother’s illness, her ongoing “life,” and its contributions to science as well as about the implications for her own health.

On the other hand, she feared that her mother’s cells felt the effects of the diseases they were employed to study. At times Deborah believed her mother to be, in some sense, alive and capable of feeling the pain and other accompanying effects of AIDS, Ebola, and other diseases. She had read that her mother’s cells had been used for researching cures for these diseases. She vacillated between a cooperative and friendly attitude toward the author and a paranoid and distrustful stance. Skloot stuck with Deborah through her bouts with depression, hysteria, and severe cases of hives.

The author once even came to blows with Lacks’s daughter, and she was present when Deborah was exorcized. By the time the book was published, Deborah had died. (Skloot, 240-299)The family saga tells not only the story of Lacks’s unfortunate daughter, Elsie, who was committed to a state hospital for “idiocy,” but also other dirty laundry, including incest, crime, and addiction. In places, the book reads like a novel, rather than a work of nonfiction.The book includes dog-eared, sepia pictures of Lacks and color photos of her surviving relatives; accounts of where she spent her life; and inhabitants engaged early in the scientific venture.

The writer manages skillfully the dissimilar threads of her study. She employs language that is reachable to the addressees ahead of the methodical community. She sustains a fragile covering of detachment with the family, yet she is involved in their lives. I think this is a fascinating narrative of the multifaceted and repeatedly catastrophic Lacks family, of the birth and continuing existence of the HeLa cells, and of the scientific humanity that persists to utilize the cells, looking for cures and information.

In my opinion this is an account of living, fatality, and immortality. (Skloot, 260-310)Works CitedSkloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Crown (New York)