course material

1. answer question without plagiarism
The Immortal Life of Henrietta LacksHer name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her
as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge
in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the
polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Henrietta’s cells
have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her
family can’t afford health insurance.Soon to be made into an HBO movie by Oprah
Winfrey and Alan Ball, this New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary
journey, from the “colored― ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark
white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying
hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and
grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. The Immortal Life of Henrietta
Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific
discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother
she never knew. It’s a story inextricably connected to the dark history of
experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over
whether we control the stuff we’re made of.Study GuideExplain how the development of
the Pap smear improved the survival rate of women diagnosed with cervical cancer. (Skloot,
2010, Chapter 3)Explain what an immortal cell line is. (Skloot, 2010, Chapter 3)Explain how
Gey’s roller-tube culturing method works. (Skloot, 2010, Chapter 4)Paraphrase the
information on page 50 describing the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. (Skloot, 2010, Chapter
6)What did HeLa allow scientists to do for the first time? (Skloot, 2010, Chapter 7)Give an
example of propaganda that was used to fuel the public’s fear and distrust of tissue
culture. (Skloot, 2010, Chapter 7)What does Skloot realize after watching the BBC
documentary about HeLa? (Skloot, 2010, Chapter 9)Why did Henrietta’s doctors need to
ask for permission to remove tissue samples after her death? How did Day initially respond
to their request? (Skloot, 2010, Chapter 12)Explain how a neutralization test is used to
determine a vaccine’s efficacy. (Skloot, 2010, Chapter 13)What unusual characteristics
of HeLa cells made them ideal for use in the polio vaccine trials? (Skloot, 2010, Chapter
13)Why did the Tuskegee Institute become involved in the mass production of HeLa cells?
Describe the depth of the Institute’s involvement. (Skloot, 2010, Chapter 13)Why did the
fact that HeLa cells are malignant make them particularly useful in the study of viruses?
(Skloot, 2010, Chapter 13)Why was the development of methods of freezing cells an
important scientific breakthrough? (Skloot, 2010, Chapter 13)Why did scientists want to be

2. able to clone cells for research? (Skloot, 2010, Chapter 13)Describe the experiment that
Chester Southam developed to test his hypothesis about HeLa. (Skloot, 2010, Chapter
17)What scientific discoveries were made possible as a result of fused hybrid cells? (Skloot,
2010, Chapter 18)What unique abilities did HeLa have that allowed it to contaminate
cultures without researchers being aware that contamination had occurred? (Skloot, 2010,
Chapter 20)Did researchers explain why they wanted DNA samples from the Lacks family?
Did the family give informed consent for the research done on those samples? Why did the
Lacks family think the doctors were taking their blood? (Skloot, 2010, Chapter 23)Describe
the lawsuit that set a legal precedent for patenting biological “products― such as cell
lines. (Skloot, 2010, Chapter 25)Describe the contribution that HeLa has made to research
on the HIV virus and the AIDS epidemic. (Skloot, 2010, Chapter 27)