Joe was the last child of Henrietta and Day before Henrietta passed away. Joe was a problem child and never got along with others. This was most likely due to the fact he never knew who she was. He also killed Eldridge Lee Ivy. For a while after, Joe hid away until he decided to turn himself in. In prison, Joe started to read the Koran, and soon after he changed his name to Zakariyya Bari Adbul Rahman. I believe Skloot added Joe to emphasize the effect of Henrietta’s death had on the Lacks children.

Stanley Gartler

In September 1966, a geneticist named Stanley Gartler announced he has found a technical problem in the field of cell culture. He proposed that HeLa cells had contaminated many other cell cultures of different kinds of cells. Gartler is added to the book to put emphasis on the fact that HeLa continued to reproduce at astounding rates.

J. Douglas

On March 9, 1973, the journal Nature published a letter from J. Douglas. He sent a letter to George Gey exclaiming that he believes that they need to set the record straight and give the woman behind HeLa the acknowledgement she deserved. In a follow up letter, Douglas sets the record straight and Henrietta Lacks becomes the woman behind the cells. Skloot added Douglas the show how Henrietta becomes known for the cells; ending chapter 22 with the true identity of the owner of the HeLa cells.

Galen

Galen is the husband of Ethel. When Deborah was younger, he raped her multiple times. I believe Galen was added to the novel to show how hard Deborah's life was as a child.

Bobbette

Bobbette is Lawerance's wife. Bobbette took the Lacks children in as her own; she ultimately becomes their mother figure, especially for Deborah. When Galen was abusing Deborah, Bobbette stepped in and told him he has to stop or she would hurt him. She also forces Deborah to finish high school. Skloot introduces Bobbette to show who the Lacks kids hadas a mother.

·  They were used to develop a cloning procedure. Before scientists could clone goats and large animals, they cloned HeLa cells.

·  Shipping the HeLa cells created a procedure for shipping live cells without them dying. It also led to standardized cell culture methods such as standardized cultures, and lab equipment, so scientists could repeat results, speeding the pace of medical advances.

·  They led to the beginning of gene mapping. On HeLa/mouse cell hybrids researchers could observe chromosomes dropping off and by determining what traits disappeared scientists were able to determine which chromosomes contained genes for various traits.

·  HeLa cells are able to be used to test if various products such as cosmetics, are harmful to human cells.

·  HeLa cells were sent to space on multiple occasions to determine the effects of zero gravity, and radiation on human cells.

·  HeLa cells revolutionized research on viruses and various diseases. Because the cells are susceptible to most diseases, they can be used to visually, and inexpensively observe if vaccines are effective in fighting off diseases.

·  The cells led to procedures to eliminate cross cell contamination after the HeLa was found in nearly every cell culture.  Scientists began to be extremely careful so that their research did not become invalid. Previously scientists had believed they were working on other human cells, while in reality they were just testing HeLa cells that had made their way into the culture.

·  The cells led to better scientific experimentation ethics, because the cells were inhumanly used in human experiments such as injecting cancerous cells into humans without knowing the effects.  These experiments were sometimes done without consent, and when the media gave news to the public about this, the public called for change to the ethics.

·  Researchers realized that cancer is not a virus, and that it is a genetic mutation, because they were unable to find a cancer cell virus in HeLa cells. This lead to the realization that finding a cure for cancer is not as simple as finding a cure for other diseases.

• The Minneapolis Star became the first publication to name the woman behind the HeLa cells. One thing was wrong, they didn't have the right name. The story said, "…from a Baltimore woman named Henrietta Lakes."

• A reporter from the Rolling Stone asked Margaret Gey about where the name "Helen Lane" came from. She told the reporter it was confused by a publisher in Minneapolis, and that the name wasn't supposed to be revealed at all.

• The press released a story about the brave men at the Ohio Penitentiary, praising them as "the first healthy human beings ever to agree to such rigorous cancer experiments." They went on to quote a man that had been injected with the cancerous cells. Reporters asked again and again why they would ever volunteer for something like this, and many answered similarly. They all said they wanted to try and do a little right to make up for all the wrong they had done.

• Three Jewish doctors, at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital (JCDH) in Brooklyn, wouldn’t inject cancer cells into the patients (as Southam had told them to), sent resignation letters to Edmund Mandel, and sent at least one of those letters to a reporter.

• A Harvard anesthesiologist named Henry Beecher published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that Southam's research was only one of hundreds of similarly unethical studies.

• By the 1960's the general public could grow HeLa at home using instructions from a Scientific American do-it-yourself article.

• The public panicked as the media published one sensational headline after the other: "Man-animal cells are bred in lab… the next step could be tree men… scientists create monsters."

• Before Gey died he told Margaret that it would be alright if she released Henrietta's name to the public now, since it had been so many years, but Margaret never told a soul.

• December 1971 was the first time Henrietta's real name was published in the journal titled Obstetrics and Gynecology, and it said, "Even now Henrietta Lacks, first as Henrietta and then as HeLa, has a combined age of 51 years."

• Walter Nelson-Rees published a "HeLa Hit List" in Science, listing any contaminate lines he found with the name of the scientist who gave him the contaminated line.

The media's role in chapters 13-22 was to try and inform the public of all the research scientists were doing with HeLa. The media also tried many times to uncover Henrietta's real identity, and even after her real name was published they still got it wrong. The reporters and the editors they worked for were trying to help the public to better understand what the cells were being used for and how they would help the world.

Chapter 13: This chapter focuses on the HeLa cells and many experiments conducted with them. It mentions the polio vaccine and the tests done on the HeLa cells to confirm that the vaccine was safe to use on humans. The chapter additionally speaks about Dr. Gey’s frustration that he made HeLa cells general scientific property before he had finished conducting his personal research on them. These events show how HeLa cells were able to be spread and help greatly with the development of new vaccines and medicines to combat diseases, illustrating how Henrietta’s death helped prevent death in a plethora of individuals.

Chapter 14: This chapter introduces the name ‘Helen Lane’, the person journalists believed were the original source of the HeLa cells. Journalists did were not aware of Henrietta Lacks’ real name. Because Henrietta’s name was not released to the press at the time, it prevented her family members to finding out the truth about what happened at the time of her death and the ingenious discoveries she helped with after her death.

Chapter 15: This chapter goes back to Deborah’s child hood, and speaks of the abuse she endured. During this chapter, Day refuses to talk to Deborah about her mother; all she knows about Henrietta is her name and that she died when Deborah was too young to remember it.

Chapter 16: Rebecca Skloot visits Henrietta’s burial site in this chapter. It is unmarked, and it is unknown which of three graves is Henrietta’s. Skloot realizes in this chapter that Henrietta’s mother passed away when Henrietta was a young child. This chapter takes Henrietta’s family back to the time of her death.

Chapter 17: In this chapter, HeLa cells are used in an experiment to see if injecting cancerous cells into patients caused them to develop cancer. This caused uproar in the field of medical ethics, and the idea of informed versus uninformed consent became a large topic in the medical world. This chapter relives the situation shortly before Henrietta’s death: she was uninformed about her condition, her treatment, and the possible outcomes and Henrietta’s death could likely have been caused by uninformed consent.

Chapter 18: This chapter speaks of how the media support for the cancer project and HeLa cell testing died when scientists made wacky HeLa cell- mouse hybrids, which were very unappealing in the public eye.

Chapter 19: In this chapter, Henrietta’s son Joe is charged with murdering a man. Joe was abused as a child and his abusers actions scarred him, leading Joe to commit this heinous crime. Deborah, who was also subject to the abuse, contemplated killing her husband. These chapters directly talk about death in the Lacks’ family.

Chapter 20: The theory of cell contamination was introduced, essentially killing all data on cells not believed to be HeLa. However, scientists’ confusion on HeLa genetics also died when the scientists were able to identify specific genes to test.

Chapter 21: It is revealed that the Johns Hopkins Hospital had been experimenting on a multitude of black patients. The doctors saw it as payment, knowing that many of the patients would have died without the medical services of Johns Hopkins. This chapter was the death of all morals in the medical world, as there was no informed consent given to the Johns Hopkins medical facility.

Chapter 22: This was the death of anonymity for Henrietta Lacks. Her name was first published, along with a picture of her, therefore forever linking her and her family to the HeLa cells.