The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Skloot, Rebecca - Essay Example

Topic:  The text your going to use Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York, NY: Broadway Paperbacks, Crown Publishing Group,Random House, Inc., 2010, 2011.Choose one of the first four chapters from the book From the early chapters of the book, particularly the second chapter, it could be said that the author’s work gives a clear indication that there is some level of good associated with everything bad. This is because for a writer who started of by writing about the agonizing life of a woman who had to battle cervical cancer, the author could however give readers and especially the family of the antagonist, who was Henrietta Lacks a very high level of hope that even though she died eventually, she continues to live because out of her cancer cell, a remedy cell called HeLa that was to be a life saving cell was to be found to help other people survive.

Therefore in the view of the writer, as long as the HeLa cell continued to exist, Henrietta Lacks, whose name make up the HeLa cell also continues to live. The author was coming from a point where a number of issues that often confront America as a society and most of which have often been subjects of debate was used. This point had to do with poverty and discrimination against the African American community of the United States. The author therefore gets to the point of winning glory out of sorrow by first writing on the theme of racial politics of medicine in America.

Even today, it is an open secret that the distribution of healthcare to the American populace has not been done fairly. This is a serious ethical issue that has a lot of negative implications on the global image of America as a multicultural society; especially when the perception continues to grow that the discrimination is against a particular race. The insight of glorifying the death of Henrietta Lacks by describing Henrietta’s life as immortal is most striking because of the background that the author had earlier given to the life of Henrietta as someone from a very vulnerable setting.

It would be noted that though the author had at different levels of her writing tried to cover up what would commonly seem as some of the most sorrowful moments in Henrietta’s life, there were still indications that Henrietta indeed suffered a lot of agonizing moments in her life. But just in a little while, the author is able to make readers come to terms with the fact that there was some good out of the life of the struggling Henrietta after all. In most circles of human endeavor, people tend to pay attention to the weaknesses and shortfalls of a person so much that they tend not to recognize any good that the person can be of at all.

This is something that the author avoided doing entirely. So it can be said that instead of the author seeking the cup as half empty, she rather saw the cup as half full. Out of every bad, there could be a very high level of good. This is perhaps a thesis that can best summarize the basic ideas that Skloot put across in her book, The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. This thesis also justifies the saying that nothing is all for a stopped clock is even right twice a day. Addressing what would naturally be seen as a very sorrowful and agonizing theme of the departure of a mother to several children, the author could squeeze water out of stone by gracefully outlining the positives that could be highlighted out of the negatives to give a resounding conclusion to the book.

This theme addressed by the writer gives a lot of implication for contemporary life application. Especially from a religious perspective, it could be said in simple terms that God knows what is best for all people. Indeed the destinies of all people are said to be in the hands of God. This means that God has a unique purpose for us all. What is left is for us as individual beings to identify the unique purposes of God for our lives. If we are able to do this, we shall come to discover that even with the very things we call evil, there is some level of blessing associated with it.

To conclude, it would be said that how long a person lived his life is not as important as how influential that life became to other people. For Henrietta Lacks, she could only live a very short life but out of this short life, which was filled with pain and sorrow, she was and continues to inspire the lives of many other people. If for nothing at all, the HeLa Cell that was collected from Hienrietta and continues to be used in scientific research for life saving purposes such as scientific tests in cancer and even AIDS.

CITED WORKS Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York, NY: Broadway Paperbacks, Crown Publishing Group, Random House, Inc., 2010, Margonelli, Lisa "Eternal Life", The New York Times Book Review, 2010.