What I found stood out to me most in Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the questionable legality of Henrietta’s cells being taken without her knowledge. As Skloot’s story unfolds, we find that there was no law yet forbidding this, excepting common decency. I was outraged at the injustice of the poverty of the Lackses while the scientific community flourished with He La, Henrietta’s unwillingly and unknowingly given donation to medical research. Had it not been for Skloot, I would never have known that many a breakthrough in oncology, the study of cancer and the practices relating to it, virology, the study of diseases, and the study of genes resulted in borderline theft of Henrietta’s cancerous cervical cells.
Racism was prominent in the time of Henrietta Lacks, so it is little surprise that, at the time, nobody seemed to care about how the cells affected Henrietta’s family, or to be more concise, how they did not. Had the Lackses been white, I believe they would have been given more information, and would have been made to understand what was happening with Henrietta’s cells. They may have, though I doubt this very much, even been given compensation for the use of He La.
In the end, Rebecca Skloot made sure that the injustice done towards Henrietta Lacks and her family did not go unnoticed with her biography of the woman and her cells, telling all that read it the story of how one woman, through death and disease, saved the lives of many, however unwittingly. Rebecca used a decade of her time to make sure this story was wholly inclusive, and in doing so, I believe she finally brought justice to the situation.
