In this unit, I read The Immortal Life of Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, annotated the book using Snapchat, which prepared me for my group discussions, one-pagers, TIEAs, and verbal analysis.
1. What Could Terribly Go Wrong for Personal Benefit?
2. Misunderstanding and Its Cause
Misunderstanding is simply where communication fails to achieve its purpose. In my life, misunderstanding of someone and the misunderstanding of me happens a lot. Most of the time it happens because of me, and I know this because I know from what came out of me is hard to understand. Misunderstanding is a misconception of the meaning of the message, which, in my opinion is much better than miscommunication. To understand a message from another, communication has to happen. By not communicating, or miscommunication, the message is basically not being sent.
In my personal experience, a simple example of misunderstanding that happened in school was that an appointed meeting with a teacher to discuss how my grade for the course can improve went totally wrong. Originally, my goal of the meeting was to discuss an improvement for my assignments in the future, but the meeting became a lecture about why I’m having the meeting. The main problem was not misunderstanding, but miscommunication. Everytime when I had something to ask, the teacher told me to listen first, and told me he/she has got an answer for me. The concept that was misunderstood was the question (message) I had that was never sent, and the teacher thought he/she had it. I soon realized that this was no discussion nor meeting, but a lecture. Therefore, the true problem is the communication that never happened.
Communication by d7o0om s via flickr / All rights reserved
In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, misunderstanding is caused by language, education differences, and race barriers. The communication between Henrietta and her cells and Doctor Gey never happened and misunderstanding occurred to Deborah about Skloot’s purpose of writing books. HeLa cells had made the world terrified of cancer. Moreover, this resulted of scientists’s selfishness and nervousness all show up at once.
In my opinion, misunderstanding could be resolved simply be a clarification or a double-check about the concept being transferred and received. The hard part for me, and probably most of the misunderstanding is the miscommunication, because with communication, lots of concepts could get straighten up.
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In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, a poor black woman named Henrietta Lacks has some cancer cells that were unique: ones that could continue cell division forever. Renamed after Henrietta Lacks, HeLa cells quickly became a new field of study. However, without the acknowledgement of Henrietta herself, her cells were taken into research and study all over the world.
“Henrietta knew nothing about her cells growing in a laboratory” (Skloot, 42).
This is just the beginning. A field of study suddenly created and extremely popular wouldn’t take long to let Henrietta figure out about what was being done with her cells. The irony here is: even if she knew sooner, there’s nothing she could do. Just like that, she soon died of cancer. But the progress never stopped, as well as the growth of her cells. Her family faced the same problem, powerless. Now we see how terribly privacy could be handled by even doctors for personal benefits. The immortality of her cells costs her life, but her life costs nothing but cells that made other people famous.
“The internet made the world a smaller place, but has the internet made the world a safer place?” (Al Jazeera).
The more people are connected together by internet, the more privacy are exposed. This is meant to take each internet user’s digital footprint into consideration in big data analytics to better understand their program for the better. In other words, considered as benefits to them.
“Internet” by John Schnobrich via Unsplash
This is evidence that the issue of progress vs. privacy does not only occur in the past, they reappear with another form in the present day–with the same reason. We should all be careful of violating others’ privacy and also protect ourselves’.