Henrietta Lacks - Primary and Secondary #6

Relevant Abstract Topic: Acceptance of Death (specifically from Deborah’s POV)

Able to live past her 30th birthday, even through her doubts of possibly being diagnosed with cancer, Deborah married James Pellum, a mechanic turned preacher who Deborah felt the safest with, when she was the age of 31. Pellum seemed unaware of Deborah’s relation to Henrietta Lacks, but, when he did, he advised Deborah to get a lawyer. This request did not interest Deborah at all though: she simply wanted to move past Henrietta Lacks’s death without suffering further trauma from this rough period in her life. Even later, Deborah was suggested the opportunity to receive a copy of her mother’s death record, but she couldn’t submit herself to additional hurt and pain, “afraid of what she might find and how it might affect her.” Obviously, based on her feelings and actions, Deborah was in a peaceful state in the mourning process. Even while she was unwilling to subject herself to the atrocities of her mother’s death, a time would come when she was ready to take in the hard and painful truth. However, this time came much earlier than anyone in the Lacks family would have liked: in 1985, a reporter Michael Gold had published a book on the Henrietta Lacks’s life, including horrific details and circumstances of her slow death. How could such a “breach of privacy” occur? Even at this time, patient confidentiality was a well-respected discipline in medical studies, but there was no such law against breaking the tenet in the late 20th century. The media, especially Gold in this case, interrupted the grieving process of the Lacks family. Skloot specifically focused on the negative consequences of the situation on Deborah Lacks, whose respect and privacy was disregarded for the shocking headlines associated with the book’s publication. Overall, Deborah seemed to be making perfect progress in accepting the death of Henrietta Lacks, but Johns Hopkins hospital and the media acted as roadblocks in Deborah’s quest for eventual happiness.

To understand the psychological realm of Deborah Lacks’s grieving process due to Henrietta’s death, I wanted to read about the grieving process. Before I expound on my comprehension of the process, I want to discuss the abstract topic of “accepting death.” Although it may seem that this must come from the dying individual, I believe “accepting” is applicable that person’s closest relative or friends. Their “acceptance” includes their feelings and actions that are a direct result of the loss, both while anticipating the loss or recovering from it. Back to the analysis of my secondary source, the most important conclusion I came to concerning the grieving process is that it’s natural and specialized to each person. A person’s reaction is dependent on numerous factors, including but not limited to personality, faith, or lack thereof, and significance of who or what was lost. In the secondary source, the author creates a section to provides a myth and counter with fact. For example, one myth he provided was “The pain will go away faster if you ignore it,” but he responds that “it is necessary to face your grief and actively deal with it.” in my opinion, this contradicts what he said earlier about the grieving process to be a highly sensitive and personal experience. For Deborah Lacks, it would be counter intuitive and illogical to rush the grieving process.

https://www.helpguide.org/articles/grief/coping-with-grief-and-loss.htm

Henrietta Lacks - Primary and Secondary #5

Relevant Abstract Topic: Money and Class in America

In Chapter 21, after Skloot identifies the event of Robert Stevenson and other scientists working to create genetic tests to indicate the presence of HeLa cells as bringing the Lacks family back into the complex scientific realm, the author outlines her conversation with Lawrence, Day Lacks, and Bobbette. She has very little to expect from the beginning, but she grows comfortable with Lawrence and takes note of his laid-back nature, contrary to how other media members would characterize him. After time, Lawrence admits that he remembers very little of his mother because of his desire to forget about all of the painful and traumatic memories of his mother’s death. However, his quiet stillness is soon replaced with a new-found upbeat behavior when Skloot explains HeLa cells’ massive contributions to science. Lawrence and Sonny have a faint idea of the cells’ significance, but they beam with pride and delight as they learn more. Minutes later, Skloot begins conversing with Day Lacks and Bobbette about a larger issue at the time: blacks in the Baltimore area being snatched by Johns Hopkins and other hospitals. This discussion stays heated for more than an hour as the issue had its effects on both Bobbette and Sonny. Finally, Lawrence brings the conversation back to Skloot, “Hopkins say they gave them cells away, but they made millions!...If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?” In-class, we discussed this important fact even before we read the book, so I was excited to finally read about it. All members of the Lacks family dealt with their own problems, ranging from medical ones to those with emotional and mental ramifications, so why didn’t Johns Hopkins hospital find it necessary to provide any resource to aid the family? Corporate greed seems to be the answer. This led me to a deeper question: if Henrietta Lacks’s identity was correctly reported from the beginning, what role would the media have played in possibly forcing medical professionals to continue rendering aid to the family?

After reading a brief history of black people being abducted by medical professionals for research purposes, as provided by Skloot, and understanding the few tidbits of Bobbette and Sonny’s heated interaction, I was motivated to read more about this specific issue of black injustice that was heavily prevalent in the 19th and 20th centuries. The most famous example was the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a brutal experiment that varied treatment of syphilis among its participants and was allowed for nearly four decades. What’s most important to note though is that any author on the Internet, through my research, to mention this study would emphasize that the experiment was a “mild example” of many during these two centuries of U.S. history. From this secondary source, I understood that the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and Henrietta Lacks’s story were simply two of hundreds or thousands of black injustice in the field of medicine.

https://thenewinquiry.com/the-case-for-medical-reparations/

Henrietta Lacks - Primary and Secondary #4

Relevant Abstract Topic: Acceptance of Henrietta Lacks’s Death (from the POV of her family)

In numerous instances leading up to Henrietta Lacks’s eventual death at the hands of doctors at Johns Hopkins, especially after Skloot’s visit to Lacks’s town of Clover, Virginia, it completely evident that the family processes the death differently than how doctors and the media did. Based on their actions, doctors saw Lacks’s death as a necessity to promote human evolution. They had already reaped the benefits of reward due to the mass production of HeLa cells. The media saw Lacks’s story as an intriguing headline that identified the spurring of successful cancer research. Near the end of Chapter 10, Cootie, Lack’s first cousin, tells Skloot that he and the family believed there were supernatural forces or “Voodoo” at play. Additionally, lack of communication from the doctors brought them to believe that the doctors purposely worsened Lacks’s condition. Furthermore, in Chapter 15, Skloot transitions the story back to life in the Lacks’ household after Lacks’s death. “Acceptance of Death” can show its positive and negative consequences. For Ethel and Galen, they despised Lacks and decided to exert her anger on Lacks’s children, abusing all of the children. They ignored Lacks’s desire to allow her kids to pursue their passions and used the children as part of her own game. The presence of both “positive” members of the Lacks’ family, including Cootie, and “negative” members, limited to Ethel and Galen, led me to a few questions. How would Lacks’s life had been different if she had grown up in a larger town, expanding the family’s access to basic health knowledge? How would our lives be different if this were the case? How far behind would scientific research be in today’s time?

The situation depicted in Chapter 15 reminds me of the central issue in the book A Child Called “It.” The author graphically details his life as a child suffering a countless number of instances at the hands of his alcoholic mother, resulting in one of the most shocking child abuse cases in the history of California. Although the reasons for her abuse are never directly stated in the book, it is reasonable to conclude that the mother’s anger stems from her divorce from her husband. She physically beats down on him and mentally abuses his state of mind by interjecting brief periods of compassion with even greater emotional trauma. From this secondary source, I understood that characters ranging from Cootie to Pelzer’s mother deal with tragedy and loss in their own unique ways, however twisted the end result may be.

Henrietta Lacks - Primary and Secondary #3

Abstract Topics Discussed: Accepting Death and Alienation Because of Race

From the beginning of Chapter 8, “A Miserable Specimen,” Henrietta Lacks is seemingly forced to “accept a painful death” in the face of cancer under the care of doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Lacks herself noticed signs of her condition worsening, but her doctors chose not to provide her with the best treatment plan, likely due to continued discrimination even at this time in U.S. history. Even while Howard Jones asserts that Lacks was provided with all adequate resources to overcome her form of cancer, he was in agreement with the power of the statistics: blacks received “fewer pain medications” and had “higher mortality rates.” Sadie Sturdivant, one of Lacks’s cousins and closest friends, identifies Lack’s unique “downfall” as not being physically noticeable but emotionally present. The author Rebecca Skloot openly wonders how Lacks’s life may have changed if she had received the proper care and treatment from Johns Hopkins. However, my question lies with different circumstances: even if today’s society experienced as much racial prejudice and discrimination as was present in the mid-20th century, would Lacks’s treatment have changed if scientists and doctors respected her as the “scientific marvel” she was to them, urging them to act in Lacks’s best interests?

Relevant to the discussion of racial inequality in healthcare, I found an interesting NCBI article titled “Reducing Racial Inequities in Health: Using What We Already Know to Take Action.” This source would further my comprehension of how racial prejudice has remained an issue in various health-care fields for more than the past century. The two authors provide immediate and long-term solutions to help diminish the disastrous effects of this issue.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6406315/  

Henrietta Lacks - Primary and Secondary #2

At the beginning of Chapter 6, when the author transitions from the discussion of Henrietta Lacks’s life after her radium treatments to her pursuit to understand more about HeLa cells, the author Rebecca Skloot finds Roland Patillo, “a professor of gynecology at Morehouse who’d been one of George Gey’s only African-American students.” Skloot wishes to talk to Patillo to receive contact information from Lacks’s family and gain greater insight into the case study. However, Patillo uses race to attempt to create a fine dividing line between Skloot, a white woman, and the black Lacks family. Patillo questions everything that Skloot knows about how African-Americans have been affected by and have contributed to science, and I find this interesting. From Patillo’s perspective, Skloot is another media figure vying to get headlines, but she proves to Patillo that she is the opposite. She wants to write a novel about Henrietta Lacks to enrich her understanding and clarify common misconceptions of the subject to her readers. Patillo’s hesitancy fades over three days, and he finally passes along the family’s contact information to Skloot with one warning: to be careful and exact on the traumatic subject. Overall, the situation highlights Skloot’s motivation to write the novel covering the life of Henrietta Lacks.

https://archives.cjr.org/the_observatory/henrietta_lacks_hela_genome_pr.php

Based on Roland Patillo’s initial reaction to Skloot’s request to receive the Lacks’s family contact information, it is evident that other media members attempted to reach out the family too without avail. Those media personnel seemingly had one common goal: to achieve a top headline the following day. They truly didn’t understand the story of the life of Henrietta Lacks to report on it. As a result, I found a secondary source that is an analysis of media coverage of HeLa cells with evidence the media seemed to “overlook ethical angles of the Henrietta Lacks’s story.” Many publicized their own prejudiced conclusions to their readers, causing many negative views in the reading community.

Secondary Source #1

Abstract Topic: Alienation of Race

After I understood and questioned Richard Wesley TeLinde’s approach in collecting data to prove cases of carcinoma in situ is a “stepping stone” to a more invasive or deadly carcinoma infection, I connected the situation to one of our summer reads: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. To provide a brief summary, the author Coates writes a letter to his fifteen-year old son, Samori, on his experiences living as a black man in the United States. Specifically, Coates writes about the death Prince Jones, a classmate of Coates’s, who was killed by a white police officer out of anger and hate. Coates depicts his classmate as a “kind, upstanding, and very religious” person, in contract to his depiction of the white police officer as “dishonest and incompetent.” In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the researcher TeLinde treats black patients unjustly by infringing on their personal conditions as a part of a larger study. I can assume that the Johns Hopkins black patients were kind and respectful to their doctors, even while they were disrespected by their researchers in this situation. Coates would avidly argue that far-reaching consequences of Prince Jones’s death were similar to those of the situation described in the book.

Primary Source #1

Abstract Topic: Money & Class in America

After Lacks went home following her visit to Johns Hopkins Hospital, Jones received biopsy results of a condition of “epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, Stage I.” Jones’s boss Richard Wesley TeLinde attempted to identify a course of action to weaken the cervical cancer present in Lacks’s body. TeLinde asserted his belief that cases of carinoma in situ, the mild version of cervical carcinoma, led to invasive carinoma, which could have deadly consequences. His idea was widely ridiculed at the time in the scientific world. In fact, when TeLinde pitched his thinking to large group of pathologists meeting in Washington D.C., “the audience heckled him off the stage.” As a result, TeLinde came back to Hopkins with one goal in mind: prove those experts wrong by tracing cases of invasive cervical cancer to a root of those of carcinoma in situ. However, how did TeLinde decide to pursue this testing? Lucky for him, he, along with many scientists of the time, were able to analyze public cases, even without the consent of those patients. Based on this, if there had been stricter federal regulations to prohibit the invasion of the confidentiality of patients’ case files, how would the field of science be different today? At Hopkins, blacks received free treatments, but what if the federal government did not identify this situation as “a proper trade off” for these people to be deposited into a public research database. How far behind would science be?

Astronomy: an understudied topic within the study of science. Astronomers and astronomy fans alike appreciate the new perspective they gain from their work. Our cities and states only make up a small portion of the country, the world, the Milky Way galaxy, and finally the universe at large. It is impossible to quantify humans’ possibilities outside of Earth and this galaxy. Our kind may be able to come in contact with extraterrestrial life only if our youth decides to appreciate the beauty outside Earth in the coming years. How can the motivation to search for life outside of Earth be translated to future generations? Well, the answer may be education: oftentimes, we celebrate the accomplishments of mankind to historical characters, from the Founding Fathers to Christopher Columbus to even Marco Polo. However, who would these figures attribute their success to? Obviously, someone must have done such a thing to the basic creation of his or her habitat.

“Near the Center of the Lagoon Nebula ” Is the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day of today, November 04, 2019

Located in Punjab, India, the Harmandir Sahib (”The Golden Temple”) is known as the holiest Gurdwara or the most important site for Sikhism followers to pray. This religious place is incredibly old as it was built in the late 16th-century. Even at that point in time, the builders were able to build the entire roof of pure gold, intensifying the overall beauty of the worship center. The temple also lies as the center of a man-made lake (Amrit Saravar - “The Pool of Holy Nectar”) inhabited with numerous forms of exotic fish. The beauty, however, serves as an illusion within India’s diverse cultural heritage. Ever since poverty became a prominent issue in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, India has stood atop all other countries for maintaining the greatest unemployment rate among its people. Most, if not all, Indian citizens rely on their religious beliefs to guide them through their lives, but how can some continue to rely on God when They have only served them with terrible living conditions? This question seems logical and may forever be a paradox. However, the situation illustrates the amount of influence Gods have on people’s lives. Religious followers never lose faith in their faith for the prospect of prosperity and beauty.

The Golden Temple, Amritsar, India

“The Golden Hour,” which generally refers to a time when an entity reaches its utmost beauty or glamour, is a common phrase and tidbit within everyday language. Specific to photography, likewise, the Golden hour refers to the first hour of light following sunrise or the last hour of light preceding sunset. In some cases, as is above, it may be impossible to correctly distinguish between the former and latter of the previous sentence. The Sun, in this picture, acts as the focal point for the photographer and viewers. Despite this, it is indeed possible to identify a coastline, multiple hills, and mountains deeper in the background. In fact, nature is of the greatest importance in this photograph, not the common characteristics of city skylines or the location’s inhabitants. How can this “Golden hour” in Brazil be any more “golden”?

Golden hour in Brazil

Michael Phelps, owner of 28 Olympic medals (23 of which are gold) and approximately 100 international competitive swimming medals, is the primo name in competitive swimming. Phelps retired from the sport three years ago, but he continues to have a lasting legacy among groups from aspiring young swimmers to old Masters swimmers. His immense success has brought popularity to competitive swimming. In fact, whenever I talk about swimming with my friends, they never cease to ask me, “Are you as fast as Michael Phelps?” However, little press is given to the fact that Michael Phelps encountered numerous mental health issues during his swimming career. Even so, some people are unwilling to believe such a successful man dealt with such issues. However, Michael Phelps still suffers from depression and anxiety today, but he does accept that such a thing will always be a part of him. During the most successful periods of his swimming career, Phelps found difficulty admitting that he was dealing with mental wellness issues. As a result, he announced a new partnership with the online therapy company Talkspace, which provides counseling services to any and all people. Phelps himself says that his swimming accolades cannot trump the amount of satisfaction he receives from helping those in need. Michael Phelps not only has helped grow the popularity of the sport of swimming but also build mental wellness campaigns to benefit all.

Phelps for Talkspace

Immediately after seeing this picture, I noticed the contrast of a “demonic” sky and serene ocean shore. Ironically, both of these features work together to form a powerful symbol of peace. In fact, upon further analysis, the colors of blue and red exist in each working part by itself. In other words, the orange sky reflects itself onto the surface of the water, and the colors of the ocean appear in the sky. Peacefulness is simply subjective: what I find peaceful may very well be different than what the next person might find calming. I personally find peace in this visual because I use given elements to create a scene for myself. I imagine myself standing on the shore -- my feet wet as water pushes past me to reach land -- simply taking in the scene that lay ahead of me. 

09-09-19

IG: realbeex

What I want from my education...

Through more than 11 years of schooling, I don’t believe I have learned nearly enough to succeed in any prospective field in the modern world. From an outsider’s view, this may seem completely confusing or mind-boggling, but I understand that education is a process. Education in my life has been a stepping stone to future stages in learning. Five or six years in elementary school are meant to prepare you for middle school, two to three years in middle school are intended to prepare you for high school, and four years in high school are meant to prepare you for the next stage in life. However, the end of “school education” is different for everyone, as some “get off” after receiving a high school diploma, while others leave “their continuous cycle of education” after receiving a bachelor’s degree. Through these differences, how can society prepare every person for a successful future? An attempt to answer such a question is futile. Individuality of education is essentially an unattainable goal for all schools, stemming from the fact that the world’s youth population is continually growing. In my opinion, I would like my “schooling education” to allow me to find a passion in a future career. Ultimately, it is my job, as it is for the rest of my peers, to investigate and ponder that future career. The modern world has the power of the Internet or “Google” to partake in such a venture, so why not use it?