The immortal life of henrietta lacks book12/21/2023 The text of an interview earlier this year with Skloot on NPR’s Fresh Air is available here. But at others, it serves as an introduction to medical/scientific ethics and. Skloot has established the Henrietta Lacks Foundation to fund scholarships and medical care for members of the Lacks family. The book is exceptionally well written, reading at times like a medical thriller. It was really interesting, and I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in these issues. It was chosen as a best book of 2010 by more than sixty media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly, People, and the New York Times. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the 2011 winner of the Young Adult Science Book category of the AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science. She talked about whether the family should be compensated, the kind of medical care Henrietta received in John Hopkins’s “colored” ward, and the past and current use of cells and tissue from people’s biopsies and other procedures for later medical research (which may make money for biotechnology corporations). In the course of her talk, Skloot read snippets of the book and discussed questions of ethics, race and class raised by the story. While Henrietta is long dead, her children and grandchildren still struggle to get medical care, and do not have health insurance. Skloots book covers the lives of Lacks five children and raises issues about racism, scientific ethics, poverty, and cancer, among others. She and her family never benefited financially from the selling of HeLa cells. Lacks and her family never knew about the vast body of research that was being conducted using the cells, or even that the cells had been taken and used for research at all. Balancing the beauty and drama of scientific discovery with dark questions about who owns the stuff our bodies are made of, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is an extraordinary journey in search of the soul and story of a real woman, whose cells live on today in all four corners of the world. Rebecca Skloot’s book chronicles the history of Henrietta Lacks and her cells (dubbed “HeLa” cells), as well as Skloot’s journey uncovering the story. Henrietta’s cells were used in the development of the polio vaccine, were sent up in early space missions, and are mentioned in tens of thousands of research papers. Her cells were the first “immortal” cells - cells kept alive in culture – and went on to be widely used in medical research. Henrietta Lacks was a poor, Black woman whose cervical cancer cells were taken in the course of her treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s. Earlier this week, I had the privilege of attending a talk by Rebecca Skloot, author of recently published book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |