Ms.�SKLOOT: She grew up on the same land that her ancestors farmed as slaves. RAZ: And before we talk about her cells, give us a sense of who Henrietta Lacks was, where she came from. RAZ: That's Rebecca Skloot, reading from her new book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." Rebecca Skloot's in our New York bureau. I'm pretty sure that she, like most of us, would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. Ms.�REBECCA SKLOOT (Author, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"): (Reading) I've tried to imagine how she'd feel, knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization.
Those cells from Henrietta's body became the world's first immortal human cell line, replicating in Petri dishes in laboratories around the world. Now, before the cancer devoured her, doctors took tissue samples from her cervix, and they took them without her permission. She was a young, poor, African-American mother of five. Henrietta died of cervical cancer in 1951. Science writer Rebecca Skloot keeps a photo on her wall of a woman she's never met, a woman named Henrietta Lacks. She wanted to have a bigger family, but with undergoing treatment, it stopped that completely, shattering her dreams of having anymore children of her own.Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. To Henrietta, reproducing was a valued thing. Her death, in 1951, might have been prevented, but even if the radiation did kill the cancer, she'd never be able to reproduce. The help was no match for the tumor that, over time, spread throughout her body and claimed the life of Henrietta Lacks. The radiation eventually began burning both the internal and external parts of her body around the vaginal/cervix area. " By then she had already began her rounds of treatment and "it was too late," so there was nothing Henrietta could do about it. When she found out her restriction, she immediately started to regret getting the help she already began receiving, saying that, ".if she had been told so before, she would not have gone through with. Not only was that wrong to not inform her of the effects of the radiation, but lie to the records that he did. He stated in his charts that he did, but it was a lie. The doctor never informed her that her treatment would prevent her from having any more kids. The news that she would later find out would cause her to regret even finding ease in the first place. This was thought as a good thing to help her, but what she didn't know was that something meant to help her would actually end up hurting her. In Henrietta's case, in order to shrink her tumor, she'd have to undergo radiation. It's essential for a doctor to have the consent of the patient before operating on them because if something goes wrong, the doctor will be the one at fault. Instead of her almost year battle, the cancer cells would have spread quicker and cut her time short a couple of months.
Stopping Lack’s radiation would have still killed her, but faster than it did. Although, it did hurt her, however, it did help her as well. Gey’s diagnosis, then he probably would have stopped the diagnosis and radiation, which was even still harming instead of helping Henrietta. If Henrietta Lacks would have doubted Dr. Since Henrietta was a female, she had absolutely no authority or right to question a male, especially because she was a Negro and he was white. This was the complete opposite of what actually happened. Since he was a doctor, Henrietta believed that he would do what’s best for her and that he knew what he was doing. Gey, who she knew best, because he was a doctor.Īs you read this section of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks on page 63, you feel that the credibility of the doctor towards Henrietta Lacks. She constantly spent days in agonizing pain and “…she thought the cancer was spreading, that she could feel it moving through her, but found nothing wrong with her.” Although Henrietta felt the excruciating pain that the cervical cancer left her with, she listened to Dr. Even though Henrietta felt the cancer multiplying inside of her, many felt like it wasn’t true.
0 kommentar(er)
