Would it be fair to you and your family if someone benefited from your own cells without anyone in your family knowing? This is one of the problems that Henrietta Lacks and her family faced in the novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta. Henrietta Lacks was a poor black farm girl who was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Her pain and tumors forced her to visit John Hopkins Hospital for radiation treatments. Here, doctors took samples of his tissue, one from the tumor and another from nearby healthy tissue, without his consent. These ended up becoming an important factor in scientific discovery in the medical/medicinal field. These breakthroughs include the discovery of cures for polio, smallpox, and other serious diseases. Throughout the book, we see how racism/equality, the use of self-profit, and trust have a great impact in Henrietta's eyes. In Henrietta's time, equality was not granted to everyone, especially those of color. Since Henrietta trusted the doctors, who worked on her, because they knew what they were doing, her trust in them was broken when the doctors, more specifically Dr. George Grey, took her cells without her consent or his damned knowledge. This eventually turned into a profit for the doctor in the medical field as Henrietta's cells worked. During the 1950s and 1960s, equality for people of color was non-existent, especially when it came to health and medical care. Most hospitals only cared for whites, and only a certain number of hospitals treated blacks. John Hopkins Hospital was the only hospital in the Henrietta area that treated blacks. At Johns Hopkins, blacks were treated with all the equipment needed to meet their medical needs; however, he was not treated quite like white people. Although blacks were treated, conditions were much worse than those of whites due to their race and lack of money to pay for treatment. At this hospital, “several studies showed that black patients were treated and admitted to the hospital at more advanced stages of their illness than white patients, received less pain medication, and, as a result, had a higher mortality rate” (64 ). This was exemplified in the way doctors treated Henrietta and her family. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Science is based on hard, hard facts, and the attitude developed by the scientific community is on par with that very mentality. These doctors thought that because the Lacks were a poor black farm family who did not earn as much as a typical white family, they could take advantage of this and do things without the family's consent, such as taking samples of Henrieta's cells without their knowledge, not even though Henrietta signed a form that stated, “I hereby give consent to the staff of Johns Hopkins Hospital to perform any operative procedures” (31). Furthermore, because Henrietta trusted the doctors in whatever they did to "help" her, these doctors exploited her by doing what they believed would be beneficial to themselves. These doctors kept Henrietta in the dark about the HeLa cells so they could profit from them by distributing them to medical centers everywhere. This was not only done by the family's lack of knowledge, but also by Dr. Gey and his drive for medical success. This not only proved that Dr. Gey was a "genesis" in discovering it, but also showed how..