Part 3 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

After finishing the book and looking back on it, I feel as though race did not play as an important role after Henrietta's death and the events that took place afterwards. However, there were still a couple racial undertones I picked up on. One was how the scientific community treated the Lack's family, believing that they simply could not understand what was going on. They largely white scientific community believed because of the Lack's race that the would never understand what the cells were for, how they worked, and other common scientific knowledge. This really frustrated the family because without a proper explanation, they believed it was a sort of religious event that they compared it to the resurrection of Jesus. This is how Gary explained it, that the HeLa cells were "Henrietta's spiritual body and that she had been chosen by the Lord to become an immortal being." (496-497) This is what made sense to the family who never received any education and made the most sense.
Morality and ethics continued to be a major theme in the book all the way until the end. The result of the lack of ethics at that time was exploitation of the Lacks family and the complete lack of proper consent and communication. Chapter 23 shows this when blood was needed from living relatives of Henrietta for use on decoding the human genome. McKusick sent his assistant Hsu to do this. She was told not to tell or explain anything to the family about why there blood was being taken. Hsu ends of lying and saying it is a "cancer test". Hsu never had Day sign any consent papers or even explained what was truly going on at all. Apparently, Hsu said no such thing however. This continued pattern of misinformation and miscommunication allowed the family to begin to think of the worst things possible that were occurring to Henrietta. They believed she was actually alive and was being experimented on and even clones were being created of her. You can see in chapter 32 what happens though when the time is taken to show and explain to the family what is truly going on as Lengauer did. He simply treated them with respect and understood what had happen to that family. This experience was actually healing to the children who were all traumatized from the events and shows what can happen with proper communication and ethics.