![]() ![]() Today are stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells, East Baltimore children and grandchildren live in obscurity, see no profits, and feel violated. The journey starts in the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s, her small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia - wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo. Yet Henrietta Lacks was buried in an unmarked grave. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping and have been bought and sold by the billions. Cells descended from her may weigh more than 50M metric tons. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells were taken without her knowledge and still live decades after her death. Henrietta Lacks, as HeLa, is known to present-day scientists for her cells from cervical cancer. I took particular notice with the author's writing style, and that's what I'll be reviewing today. It's a story that deserves to be told around the world, in medical ethics classes, the social sciences, teacher's colleges, and on and on and on. I'm glad that I finally got around to reading the book. My interest in reading the book as first piqued when I heard that Oprah would be producing a movie based on it (and duh, it's OPRAH!). Good afternoon, friends and followers! Today, I talk about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a biography written by Rebecca Skloot.
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