watch the immortal life of henrietta lacks 2017

The first-hand frustrations she feels about her lack of knowledge of her mother and the irony of those outside of the family benefiting financially off of Henrietta’s cells are clearly described. Before the first chapter, there is a small piece dedicated to Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, in which the section gives a first-person account of her experience. Skloot maintains a greater focus on Henrietta’s family throughout the biography compared to the film. Over the course of a decade, Skloot investigated the hidden past of Henrietta Lacks and the uncovered emotional baggage of the Lacks family in order to properly convey Henrietta’s life. It was from that point that she was determined to humanize the woman behind such great accomplishments.

When Skloot inquired about the type of woman Henrietta was, she was left uninformed. Rebecca Skloot experienced the startling lack of information about Henrietta firsthand during one of her biology classes. However, despite Henrietta’s significant contribution to science and medicine, little is known about her. Despite the original cells being collected over half a century ago, they maintain great relevance in the scientific community in the present. The cells were also massive contributors in recent scientific findings like the famous Human Genome Project.

Some of the most important vaccination developments, such as the polio vaccine and the HPV vaccine, can be credited to HeLa cells. Several medical accomplishments and scientific discoveries resulted from this. Since the cell line had an––essentially––unlimited supply, this accelerated the amount of experiments dealing with the cells. The cells were known as “immortal”-the cancerous cells continued to divide and replicate, whereas normal cells previously collected for lab cultivation only survived a few days.

HeLa cells were cervical cancer cells collected from an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks in 1951 by Johns Hopkins Hospital. Who was Henrietta Lacks? That’s exactly the question that Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, set out to answer. The film fails to recover the life of Henrietta, and she is once again reduced to a clump of cells. This is especially useful for portraying a person’s life during a historical time period.Īlthough the film adaptation of the biography The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is supposed to focus on humanizing Henrietta and exposing the unethicality behind her situation, the film’s rhetorical strategies instead focus on Skloot and fabricated conflicts to create drama. In an interview by Californian Magazine author Katia Savchuk, Skloot agrees with the notion that “The emotional impact of seeing the story brought to life with real people was powerful.” Not only are films quicker at delivering the information, but the visual and auditory aspects aid in learning compared to the confined readings of a book. The author further cements this argument: “Concrete images of film are easier to remember long after their display than the imagined ones required for reading” (Drucker 4). In turn, our busy, modern society pushes films as a more efficient way to consume information. One could watch an hour film that presented the same information as a 300-page book. are better vectors to reach and inform a vast audience” (4). According to the Harvard Crimson article “Watching, Not Reading,” the author, Jacob Drucker, argues that “as visual, rather than textual, stimulus. This is because films have several methods to reach a wider audience that books lack. At first glance, this seems like a triumph for those trying to raise awareness about Henrietta Lack’s situation and humanize her. After the success of Rebecca Skloot’s New York Times Best Seller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a film adaptation was released by HBO and directed by George C.

Watch the immortal life of henrietta lacks 2017