Rebecca Skloot's book, has many themes that can easily connect to our generation. One being the lack of confidentiality and privacy. As we see now a days, the lack of confidentiality and privacy are overruling every individual's life. Every time someone uses the internet it is public to anyone, no matter how private the user may think it is. Social websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, MySpace, ect.. are all open to the public and easy grant access to. Online hackers steal information from online profiles and use it in propaganda or for their profit. In Henrietta's case, her doctors took her cells without her permission to grow them in culture in a hopeful result that they would become immortal. However, George Gey did not send the cells to thousands of doctors to pose a threat on Henrietta Lacks or her family, but merely to explore science and to accomplish his dream of finding a cure for cancer. This violated her right of privacy, which is a live law now, but back then was considered a debatable topic, especially for ablack woman.
This leads me into the topic of racism in the 1950’s to racism today. Although today racism is no where as powerful as it was in the 1900’s it still exists. The characters in Rebecca’s non-fiction novel were not treated like whites especially during the times of the “Night Doctors” where doctors were accused of abducting children on the streets and performing experiments on them. In present day, diversity is cherished, so it was easy to connect to the book in that way. For instance, most people now instead of judging a person by their race, judge them based on personality. Although some still believe in people of “lower-quality” but that conception will take a while to fade because back then it was inhuman to believe that whites were not superior.