Research methods courses across psychology, sociology, biology, and public health departments frequently assign The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks early in the term, before students design or conduct any research of their own, because it makes the abstract concept of human subjects protections feel concrete and consequential. The pedagogical goal is usually not literary analysis but professional formation, helping future researchers internalize why institutional review boards exist and what can go wrong without them. Grading writing tied to this goal requires a rubric focused on whether students can translate the book's lessons into concrete principles they will actually apply in their own future research, not just whether they understood the plot.

A useful assignment structure asks students to write a short memo, styled as if addressed to a research team, listing specific safeguards that would have prevented the consent failures documented in the Lacks case. This framing pushes students past summarizing what went wrong and into the more practically valuable work of articulating what should be done differently, which is closer to the actual professional skill the course is trying to build. Grading this memo requires checking not just for accurate historical understanding but for whether the proposed safeguards are specific and actionable, rather than vague statements like "get better consent" that do not actually specify what better consent would look like in practice.

Strong memos typically address several distinct failure points from the book separately: the lack of any consent conversation before the biopsy, the absence of any mechanism for the family to learn their mother's cells were being used commercially, and the eventual publication of the family's genetic information without their permission decades later. Treating these as one undifferentiated failure produces a shallower memo than one that identifies each failure point and proposes a targeted safeguard for it specifically. A rubric that rewards this kind of granular analysis, rather than a single broad statement about the importance of consent, pushes students toward the precision that actual research ethics work requires.

Connecting the Memo to IRB Language

Since most students in a research methods course will need to write actual IRB applications later in their academic or professional careers, tying the memo assignment to real IRB terminology, such as informed consent documentation, right to withdraw, and confidentiality protections, gives the assignment direct forward utility beyond the immediate unit. Students who can connect a specific failure in the Lacks case to a specific modern IRB requirement demonstrate a level of understanding that goes beyond historical sympathy and into professional competence, which is ultimately what the course is trying to certify. Rubrics that explicitly reward this connection, rather than treating IRB terminology as optional vocabulary, tend to produce writing that better serves students down the line.

• Require the memo to address at least three distinct consent failures separately
• Score for specificity in proposed safeguards rather than general statements about ethics
• Ask students to connect each safeguard to a real IRB requirement by name
• Give credit for acknowledging tradeoffs between research efficiency and consent rigor
• Reserve top marks for memos that would genuinely be usable by a real research team

Common Weaknesses in Student Memos

The most frequent weakness is students proposing safeguards that already exist in modern research ethics without realizing it, which suggests they have not yet connected the Lacks case to the actual regulatory landscape that governs research today. This is worth catching with specific feedback rather than just a lower score, since it points to a real gap in understanding that the course still needs to close before students move on to designing their own studies. A comment that names the existing regulation and asks the student to think one step further, toward gaps that still exist even under current rules, turns this weakness into a genuine learning moment rather than a simple deduction.

A second common weakness is treating consent as a single moment, a signature on a form, rather than an ongoing relationship, which the book itself pushes back against by showing how the Lacks family's confusion persisted for decades after any initial interaction with the hospital. Students who internalize the book's actual argument tend to propose safeguards for ongoing communication and updates, not just a stronger initial consent form, and a rubric that explicitly rewards this broader view of consent helps steer students away from the narrower, more common interpretation that misses much of what the book is arguing.

Using the Memo as a Foundation for Later Assignments

Because most research methods courses culminate in students designing an actual study proposal, the Henrietta Lacks memo works well as an early foundation students can reference later when they write the ethics section of their own proposal. Instructors who explicitly tell students to keep this memo and revisit it when drafting their final proposal report that the later ethics sections tend to be noticeably stronger than in years when the two assignments were treated as unconnected. This continuity also makes grading the final proposal's ethics section faster, since the instructor already has a sense of what each student understands about consent from the earlier memo and can focus feedback on whether that understanding transferred successfully to a new context.

Some instructors go further and require a short paragraph in the final proposal explicitly citing back to a lesson from the Lacks memo, which keeps the connection visible rather than assumed. This small structural requirement costs little in terms of added grading time but reinforces for students that research ethics is not a box checking exercise confined to one early unit but a way of thinking that should run through the entire research design process from the first assignment to the last.