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Faith, Cancer, Death, Racism, Science, and Ethics
A Research Sampling by Rudolph Lewis
Henrietta Lacks
(August 18, 1920 – October 4, 1951) was an
African–American woman who was the unwitting donor of
cells from her cancerous tumor, which were
cultured by
George Otto Gey to create an
immortal
cell line for medical research. This is now known as
the
HeLa cell line.
Henrietta Lacks,
née Loretta Pleasant, was born on August 1, 1920 in
Roanoke, Virginia to Eliza (1886–1924) and John
Randall Pleasant I (1881–1969) Her family is uncertain
how her name changed from Loretta to Henrietta; with
Hennie as a nickname. Eliza died giving birth to her
tenth child in 1924. Sometime after his wife's death,
John Pleasant took the children back to where their
maternal relatives lived, and they were raised there by
their mother's relatives. Henrietta ended up with her
grandfather in
Clover, Virginia.[1]
John worked as a
brakeman on the railroad.
Henrietta Pleasant
married her first cousin, David "Day" Lacks (1915–2002),
in
Halifax County, Virginia. David had already been
living with Henrietta's grandfather when she had moved
there at age 4. Their marriage in 1941, after their
first two children were born, surprised many in the
family as they had been raised like brother and sister.[1]
After convincing David to go north to search for work,
Henrietta followed in 1943, bringing their children with
her. David found work at the
Sparrow's Point shipyards and found a house for them
on New Pittsburgh Avenue in
Turners Station, now a part of
Dundalk,
Baltimore County,
Maryland. This community was one of the largest and
one of the youngest of the approximately forty
historically
African American communities in Baltimore County.
The couple had five
children together: Lawrence (b. 1935), Elsie (b. 1939),
David "Sonny" Jr. (b. 1947), Deborah (b. 1949), and
Joseph (b. 1950, changed name to Zakariyya Bari Abdul
Rahman). Joseph Lacks, Henrietta's last child, was born
at
Johns Hopkins Hospital in November 1950, just four
and a half months before Henrietta was diagnosed with
cancer. Elsie was described by the family as
"different", "deaf and dumb" and eventually died in the
Crownsville State Hospital in 1955. Years later the
family learned Elsie had been abused there and may have
had holes drilled in her head during experiments. Elsie
had been placed there about 1950, the same timeframe
Henrietta discovered she had lumps and unusual bleeding.
. . .
In her 2010 book,
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,
Rebecca Skloot documents the histories of both the
HeLa cell line and the Lacks family. Henrietta's
husband, David Lacks, was told little following her
death. Suspicions fueled by racial issues prevalent in
the South were compounded by issues of class and
education. For their part, members of the Lacks family
were kept in the dark about the existence of the tissue
line, and when its existence was revealed, family
members were confused about how Henrietta's cells could
have been taken without consent and how they could still
be alive 50 years after her death.—Wikipedia
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A Conspiracy of Cells
One Woman's Immortal Legacy and the Medical Scandal It
Caused
By Michael Gold
170 pp. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1986
HeLa’ Legacy (June 15, 1986)—A Review by Harold M.
Smeck, Jr.—Mr. Nelson-Rees had the embarrassing
task of telling Soviet scientists that the cells in
which their viruses were growing were not even derived
from Russian cancer patients. The cells actually
originated from
Henrietta Lacks, who died in Baltimore in 1951 of a
raging malignancy of the cervix.
Cancer cells taken
from her body before her death have never stopped
growing and are multiplying en masse today in
laboratories all over the world. They are known to
scientists as
HeLa cells, from the first two letters of her first
and last names. They have proved a real boon to
researchers but also a bane because they grow so
luxuriantly that they usurp other cell cultures, to
which they have often been introduced accidentally by
even the most minor deviations from careful technique.
That was how they
got into the Soviet cultures and into many of the cell
types most widely used in research in the United States.
HeLa cells ruined expensive scientific studies
because many research teams that thought they were
studying different tissue types from many individuals
were all unknowingly working with the wildfire growths
derived from Mrs. Lacks's cancer.
Mr. Nelson-Rees
became the scientific world's persistent watchdog in
finding the cases in which other cell cultures were
overgrown and replaced by
HeLa cells. The book shows him as a perfectionist,probably
not too likable under the best of circumstances. Over
the years his ''hit lists'' of contaminated cell types
earned him acrimony from many scientists who didn't
believe him at first but later had to watch years of
their own painstaking research go down the drain because
they had not really known what cells they were using.
Many cell cultures, some of them ostensibly pure
''reference strains'' from national repositories, have
been unmasked as
HeLa
cells growing under other labels.
. . .
Mr. Nelson-Rees quit his research in 1981 in the face of
continuing antagonism from other scientists and budget
cuts by the National Cancer Institute. His watchdog role
against invasions by the
HeLa
cells has ended. Mr. Gold's thesis is that today this
work is being neglected, endangering the whole
enterprise of biomedical research.—NYTimes
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Reviews
Henrietta Lacks’
‘Immortal’ Cells—Journalist Rebecca Skloot’s new book
investigates how a poor black tobacco farmer had a
groundbreaking impact on modern medicine—A Review by
Sarah Zielinski—Smithsonian.com, January 22, 2010—In
1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in
Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human
cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black
woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called
HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical
research—though their donor remained a mystery for
decades. In her new book,
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,
journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the
source of the amazing
HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks, and documents the cell
line's impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks
family. . . [Henrietta] was a
black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia who got
cervical cancer when she was 30. A doctor at Johns
Hopkins took a piece of her tumor without telling her
and sent it down the hall to scientists there who had
been trying to grow tissues in culture for decades
without success. No one knows why, but her cells never
died. . . .
Henrietta’s cells were the
first immortal human cells ever grown in culture. They
were essential to developing the polio vaccine. They
went up in the first space missions to see what would
happen to cells in zero gravity. Many scientific
landmarks since then have used her cells, including
cloning, gene mapping, and in vitro fertilization.—Smithsonian
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Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in
Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the
tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly
aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of
her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or
consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide
one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human
cells that could survive—even thrive—in the lab. Known
as
HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a
building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning
with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta's family
continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health,
and their discovery decades later of her unknowing
contribution—and her cells' strange survival—left them
full of pride, anger, and suspicion.
For a decade,
[Rebecca] Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered
the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust
of the family while helping them learn the truth about
Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and
haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our
bodies? And who carries our memories?—Tom
Nissley,
Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010
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[Rebecca] Skloot's portraits of Deborah [Lacks], her
father and brothers are so vibrant and immediate they
recall Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's
Random Family. Writing in plain, clear
prose, Skloot avoids melodrama and makes no judgments.
Letting people and events speak for themselves, Skloot
tells a rich, resonant tale of modern science, the
wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit
society's most vulnerable people.—Starred Review.
Publishers Weekly
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As Deborah Lacks
and Skloot search for answers, we're bounced
effortlessly from the tiny tobacco-farming Virginia
hamlet of Henrietta's childhood to modern-day Baltimore,
where Henrietta's family remains. Along the way, a
series of unforgettable juxtapositions: cell culturing
bumps into faith healings, cutting edge medicine
collides with the dark truth that Henrietta's family
can't afford the health insurance to care for diseases
their mother's cells have helped to cure.Rebecca Skloot
tells the story with great sensitivity, urgency and, in
the end, damn fine writing. I highly recommend this
book.—Jad
Abumrad
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A Lasting Gift
to Medicine That Wasn’t Really a Gift—A Review by Denise
Grady—February 1, 2010—Fifty years after Henrietta
Lacks died of
cervical cancer in the “colored” ward at Johns
Hopkins Hospital, her daughter finally got a chance to
see the legacy she had unknowingly left to science. A
researcher in a lab at Hopkins swung open a freezer door
and showed the daughter, Deborah Lacks-Pullum, thousands
of vials, each holding millions of cells descended from
a bit of tissue that doctors had snipped from her
mother’s cervix.
Ms. Lacks-Pullum
gasped. “Oh God,” she said. “I can’t believe all that’s
my mother.” When the researcher handed her one of the
frozen vials, Ms. Lacks-Pullum instinctively said,
“She’s cold,” and blew on the tube to warm it. “You’re
famous,” she whispered to the cells. Minutes later,
peering through a microscope, she pronounced them
beautiful. But when she asked the researcher which were
her mother’s normal cells and which the
cancer cells, his answer revealed that her precious
relic was not quite what it seemed. The cells, he
replied, were “all just cancer.”
The vignette comes
from a gripping new book,
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown
Publishers), by the journalist Rebecca Skloot. The story
of Mrs. Lacks and her cells, and the author’s own
adventures with Mrs. Lacks’s grown children (one fries
her a pork chop, and another slams her against a wall)
is by turns heartbreaking, funny and unsettling. The
book raises troubling questions about the way Mrs. Lacks
and her family were treated by researchers and about
whether patients should control or have financial claims
on tissue removed from their bodies.—NYTimes
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* * *
Cancer cells
killed Henrietta Lacks—then made her immortal—A Review by
Denise Watson Batts—The
Virginian-Pilot—May
10, 2010—Sonny Lacks is known for his smile.
Wide and welcoming, it’s a feature that others tell him
he shares with his mother.He wishes he knew that for
himself, but he was only 4 when she died. On a recent
Monday afternoon, Sonny and his older brother, Lawrence,
sat at a dining room table in Baltimore and examined
sketches of what will be their mother’s tombstone.
They’ve never had enough money for one. Finally, after
all these years, a gift will allow their mother to be
remembered as they want her to be.
Lawrence looked at
the images but said little. He doesn’t like talking
about the mother he lost when he was 16. “Don’t know
why; I never could,” he said, taking off his glasses and
rubbing his moist eyes. “I just can’t.” The course of
their lives changed in 1951 when their mother visited
what was then Johns Hopkins Hospital, just 20 minutes
down the road from where her boys now live. It was there
that doctors discovered her strange illness and removed
mysterious cells from her body.
The sons are one
legacy of
Henrietta Lacks—a poor woman from the tobacco fields
of south-central Virginia. The other is this: Her cells
are still multiplying ferociously nearly six decades
after her death. They have led to medical miracles such
as the vaccine for polio and have produced millions of
dollars in revenue for others. The family’s great loss
has become the world’s great gain.
|
Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta
Pleasant on Aug. 1, 1920, in Roanoke. The
boys aren’t sure how she became Henrietta,
which was shortened to Hennie after her
mother’s death when the girl was 4. Hennie
and her nine siblings were sent to live with
aunts, uncles and cousins in the tiny
farming town of Clover, about four hours
west of Norfolk. Hennie landed with her
grandfather, who also was raising one of her
first cousins, David. They lived in what was
called the “home-house,” a two-story cabin
built of hand-hewn logs and pegs that once
was the slave quarters of their ancestors. .
. .
Cousin
Sadie Grinnan, now Sadie Sturdivant, 81,
lives in Nathalie, near Clover, and is
bothered by it, too. “These other people,”
she said, “are making billions and
billions.” What was hardest for Hennie’s
children to deal with was that so many
people knew so much about their mother,
while they knew so little. “That’s what
hurts,” Sonny said. Now, he’s looking for
closure. It began in earnest with the
release earlier this year of Rebecca
Skloot’s book,
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
The
book recounts the family’s struggle, the
science and the ethical implications
surrounding the use of the cells. Sonny’s
sister Deborah had worked closely with the
author but died last May from heart disease.
Deborah, who was 59, went to her grave
wanting to honor her mother. Sonny now is
determined to fulfill her wish.
photo: Henrietta and David Lacks, ca. 1945 |
 |
The family is
working with an attorney to get a handle on all things
Henrietta. For example, Sonny recently heard that a
group in New York is holding a Henrietta Lacks race, and
he wondered how people could do that without the
family’s permission. He and his brothers don’t have the
time or know-how to answer those kinds of questions.
Lawrence, now 75,
rehabilitates houses for a living. Sonny, 62, is a truck
driver who often picks up his grandkids in the
afternoons. He helps out his younger brother, Joe, who
changed his name to Zakariyya Abdul Rahman and goes by
Abdul. At 59, Abdul has problems with his legs and can’t
get around easily. The family has pooled its money to
buy headstones for their father, who died in 2002 and is
buried in Baltimore, and for Elsie, whose body was
relocated to a grave near her mother’s in Clover.—HamptonRoads
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A Woman’s
Undying Gift to Science—A Review by Dwight
Garner—February 2, 2010—I put down Rebecca Skloot’s
first book,
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, more than
once. Ten times, probably. . . . was holding one of the
most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a
very long time.
A thorny and
provocative book about cancer, racism, scientific ethics
and crippling poverty,
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks also floods
over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had
managed to distill and purify the more addictive
qualities of
Erin Brockovich,
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and
The Andromeda Strain. More than 10 years in the
making, it feels like the book Ms. Skloot was born to
write. It signals the arrival of a raw but quite real
talent.
The woman who
provides this book its title, Henrietta Lacks, was a
poor and largely illiterate Virginia tobacco farmer, the
great-great-granddaughter of slaves. Born in 1920, she
died from an aggressive cervical cancer at 31, leaving
behind five children. No obituaries of Mrs. Lacks
appeared in newspapers. She was buried in an unmarked
grave.
To scientists,
however,
Henrietta Lacks almost immediately became known
simply as
HeLa (pronounced hee-lah), from the first two
letters of her first and last names. Cells from Mrs.
Lacks’s cancerous cervix, taken without her knowledge,
were the first to grow in culture, becoming “immortal”
and changing the face of modern medicine. There are, Ms.
Skloot writes, “trillions more of her cells growing in
laboratories now than there ever were in her body.” Laid
end to end, the world’s
HeLa cells would today wrap around the earth three
times. . . .
Ms. Skloot is a
memorable character herself. She never intrudes on the
narrative, but she takes us along with her on her
reporting, as she moves around the country in her
battered, muffler-free black Honda. Her most complicated
job is to get Mrs. Lacks’s family, who are tired of
white people trying to pry information from them, to
speak with her. She does eventually win them over. And
Mrs. Lacks’s daughter Deborah is dead-on when she says
to Ms. Skloot: “Get ready, girl. You got no idea what
you gettin’ yourself into.”
Ms. Skloot writes
with particular sensitivity and grace about the history
of race and medicine in America. Black oral history, she
points out, is full of stories about “night doctors,”
men who could pluck black patients off the streets to
experiment on their bodies. There was some truth behind
those tales. . . .
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is
also, from first page to last, a meditation on medical
ethics—on the notion of informed consent, and on the
issue of who owns human cells. When they’re in your
body, it’s obvious — they’re yours. But once they’ve
been removed? All bets are clearly off.
This is the place
in a review where critics tend to wedge in the sentence
that says, in so many words, “This isn’t a perfect
book.” And
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks surely
isn’t. But there isn’t much about it I’d want to change.
It has brains and pacing and nerve and heart, and it is
uncommonly endearing. You might put it down only to wipe
off the sweat.NYTtimes
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Eternal Life—A
Review by Lisa Margonelli—February 5, 2010—From the
very beginning there was something uncanny about the
cancer cells on
Henrietta Lacks’s cervix. Even before killing Lacks
herself in 1951, they took on a life of their own.
Removed during a
biopsy and cultured without her permission, the
HeLa cells (named from the first two letters of her
first and last names) reproduced boisterously in a lab
at Johns Hopkins—the first human cells ever to do so.
HeLa became an instant biological celebrity,
traveling to research labs all over the world. Meanwhile
Lacks, a vivacious 31-year-old African-American who had
once been a tobacco farmer, tended her five children and
endured scarring radiation treatments in the hospital’s
“colored” ward.
After
Henrietta Lacks’s death,
HeLa went viral, so to speak, becoming the godmother
of virology and then biotech, benefiting practically
anyone who’s ever taken a pill stronger than aspirin.
Scientists have grown some 50 million metric tons of her
cells, and you can get some for yourself simply by
calling an 800 number.
HeLa has helped build thousands of careers, not to
mention more than 60,000 scientific studies, with nearly
10 more being published every day, revealing the secrets
of everything from aging and cancer to mosquito mating
and the cellular effects of working in sewers.
HeLa is so outrageously robust that if one cell
lands in a petri dish, it proceeds to take over. And so,
like any good celebrity, HeLa had a scandal: In 1966 it
became clear that HeLa had contaminated hundreds of cell
lines, destroying research as far away as Russia. . . .
In
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca
Skloot introduces us to the “real live woman,” the
children who survived her, and the interplay of race,
poverty, science and one of the most important medical
discoveries of the last 100 years. Skloot narrates the
science lucidly, tracks the racial politics of medicine
thoughtfully and tells the Lacks family’s often painful
history with grace. She also confronts the spookiness of
the cells themselves, intrepidly crossing into the
spiritual plane on which the family has come to
understand their mother’s continued presence in the
world. Science writing is often just about “the facts.”
Skloot’s book, her first, is far deeper, braver and
more wonderful.
Skloot didn’t know
what she was getting into when she began researching the
book as a graduate student in 1999. The first time she
called Lacks’s widower, then living in Baltimore, the
person who answered the phone simply heard her voice and
yelled, “Get Pop, lady’s on the phone about his wife
cells.” Over the years it took Skloot to gain the
family’s trust, she came to understand that the only
time white people ever called the house was when they
wanted something to do with the
HeLa cells. Some of the family feel they’ve been
ripped off, cheated by either Johns Hopkins (though the
hospital never sold the cells) or the entire medical
establishment, which has made enormous profits from the
cells. . . .
But
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is much
more than a portrait of the Lacks family. It is also a
critique of science that insists on ignoring the messy
human provenance of its materials. “Scientists don’t
like to think of
HeLa cells as being little bits of Henrietta because
it’s much easier to do science when you dissociate your
materials from the people they come from,” a researcher
named Robert Stevenson tells Skloot in one of the many
ethical discussions seeded throughout the book.
The ethical issues
implicated in the
HeLa story are many and tangled. Since 1951, science
has progressed much faster than our ability to figure
out what is right and wrong about tissue culture. In the
1980s a doctor who had removed the cancer-ridden spleen
of a man named John Moore patented some of the cells to
create a cell line then valued at more than $3 billion,
without Moore’s knowledge. Moore sued, and on appeal the
court ruled that patients had the right to control their
tissues, but soon that was struck down by the California
Supreme Court, which said that tissue removed from the
body had been abandoned as medical waste.
The cell line
created by the doctor had been “transformed” via his
“inventive effort,” and to say otherwise would “destroy
the economic incentive to conduct important medical
research.” The court said that doctors should disclose
their financial interests and called on legislators to
increase patient protections and regulation, but this
has hardly hindered the growth of the field. In 1999 the
RAND Corporation estimated that American labs alone held
more than 307 million tissue samples from some 178
million people. Not only is the question of payment for
profitable tissues unresolved, Skloot notes, but it’s
still not necessary to obtain consent to store cells and
tissue taken in diagnostic procedures and then use the
samples for research.—NYTimes
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 |
Prologue: The Woman in the
Photograph—Excerpts—The
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks—By
Rebecca Skloot—There's a photo on my
wall of a woman I've never met, its left
corner torn and patched together with tape.
She looks straight into the camera and
smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly
pressed, lips painted deep red. It's the
late 1940s and she hasn't yet reached the
age of thirty. Her light brown skin is
smooth, her eyes still young and playful,
oblivious to the tumor growing inside her—a
tumor that would leave her five children
motherless and change the future of
medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says
her name is "Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or
Helen Larson."
No one
knows who took that picture, but it's
appeared hundreds of times in magazines and
science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory
walls. She's usually identified as Helen
Lane, but often she has no name at all.
She's simply called HeLa, the code name
given to the world's first immortal human
cells—her cells, cut from her cervix just
months before she died. Her real name is
Henrietta Lacks.
I've
spent years staring at that photo, wondering
what kind of life she led, what happened to
her children, and what she'd think about
cells from her cervix living on
forever—bought, sold, packaged, and shipped
by the trillions to laboratories around the
world. I've tried to imagine how she'd feel
knowing that her cells went up in the first
space missions to see what would happen to
human cells in zero gravity, or that they
helped with some of the most important
advances in medicine: the polio vaccine,
chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in
vitro fertilization. I'm pretty sure that
she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear
that there are trillions more of her cells
growing in laboratories now than there ever
were in her body. . . . |
When I got my first
computer in the mid-nineties and started using the
Internet, I searched for information about her, but
found only confused snippets: most sites said her name
was Helen Lane; some said she died in the thirties;
others said the forties, fifties, or even sixties. Some
said ovarian cancer killed her, others said breast or
cervical cancer.
Eventually I
tracked down a few magazine articles about her from the
seventies. Ebony quoted Henrietta's husband
saying, "All I remember is that she had this disease,
and right after she died they called me in the office
wanting to get my permission to take a sample of some
kind. I decided not to let them." Jet said the
family was angry—angry that Henrietta's cells were being
sold for twenty-five dollars a vial, and angry that
articles had been published about the cells without
their knowledge. It said, "Pounding in the back of their
heads was a gnawing feeling that science and the press
had taken advantage of them."
The articles all
ran photos of Henrietta's family: her oldest son sitting
at his dining room table in Baltimore, looking at a
genetics textbook. Her middle son in military uniform,
smiling and holding a baby. But one picture stood out
more than any other: in it, Henrietta's daughter,
Deborah Lacks, is surrounded by family, everyone
smiling, arms around each other, eyes bright and
excited. Except Deborah. She stands in the foreground
looking alone, almost as if someone pasted her into the
photo after the fact. She's twenty-six years old and
beautiful, with short brown hair and catlike eyes. But
those eyes glare at the camera, hard and serious. The
caption said the family had found out just a few months
earlier that Henrietta's cells were still alive, yet at
that point she'd been dead for twenty-five years.
All of the stories
mentioned that scientists had begun doing research on
Henrietta's children, but the Lackses didn't seem to
know what that research was for. They said they were
being tested to see if they had the cancer that killed
Henrietta, but according to the reporters, scientists
were studying the Lacks family to learn more about
Henrietta's cells. The stories quoted her son Lawrence,
who wanted to know if the immortality of his mother's
cells meant that he might live forever too. But one
member of the family remained voiceless: Henrietta's
daughter, Deborah.
As I worked my way
through graduate school studying writing, I became
fixated on the idea of someday telling Henrietta's
story. At one point I even called directory assistance
in Baltimore looking for Henrietta's husband, David
Lacks, but he wasn't listed. I had the idea that I'd
write a book that was a biography of both the cells and
the woman they came from—someone's daughter, wife, and
mother.
I couldn't have
imagined it then, but that phone call would mark the
beginning of a decadelong adventure through scientific
laboratories, hospitals, and mental institutions, with a
cast of characters that would include Nobel laureates,
grocery store clerks, convicted felons, and a
professional con artist. . . .
Deborah and I came
from very different cultures: I grew up white and
agnostic in the Pacific Northwest, my roots half New
York Jew and half Midwestern Protestant; Deborah was a
deeply religious black Christian from the South. I
tended to leave the room when religion came up in
conversation because it made me uncomfortable; Deborah's
family tended toward preaching, faith healings, and
sometimes voodoo. She grew up in a black neighborhood
that was one of the poorest and most dangerous in the
country; I grew up in a safe, quiet middle-class
neighborhood in a predominantly white city and went to
high school with a total of two black students. I was a
science journalist who referred to all things
supernatural as "woo-woo stuff"; Deborah believed
Henrietta's spirit lived on in her cells, controlling
the life of anyone who crossed its paths. Including me.
"How else do you
explain why your science teacher knew her real name when
everyone else called her Helen Lane?" Deborah would say.
"She was trying to get your attention." This thinking
would apply to everything in my life: when I married
while writing this book, it was because Henrietta wanted
someone to take care of me while I worked. When I
divorced, it was because she'd decided he was getting in
the way of the book. When an editor who insisted I take
the Lacks family out of the book was injured in a
mysterious accident, Deborah said that's what happens
when you piss Henrietta off.
The Lackses
challenged everything I thought I knew about faith,
science, journalism, and race. Ultimately, this book is
the result. It's not only the story of
HeLa cells and
Henrietta Lacks, but of Henrietta's
family—particularly Deborah—and their lifelong struggle
to make peace with the existence of those cells, and the
science that made them possible.—NYTimes
Rebecca Skloot is a
science writer whose work has appeared in The New
York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine;
Discover; and many other publications.
She specializes in narrative science writing and has
explored a wide range of topics, including goldfish
surgery, tissue ownership rights, race and medicine,
food politics, and packs of wild dogs in Manhattan. She
is the guest editor of The Best American Science
Writing 2011, a contributing editor at Popular
Science magazine, and has worked as a correspondent
for WNYC’s Radiolab and PBS’s Nova Science NOW. Her
writing has been widely anthologized — read a selection
on
the stories page of this site.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, her debut
book, took more than a decade to research and write, and
instantly became a New York Times best-seller. She has
been featured on numerous television shows, including
CBS Sunday Morning, The Colbert Report,
Fox Business News, and others. Her book was named a
Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick for
Spring 2010, and received widespread critical acclaim,
with reviews appearing in The New Yorker,
Washington Post, Science, Entertainment
Weekly, People, and many others. . . . Skloot
served for eight years on the Board of Directors of the
National Book Critics Circle, where she was a vice
president and judge for their yearly book awards. She
has a B.S. in biological sciences and an MFA in creative
nonfiction. She financed her degrees by working in
emergency rooms, neurology labs, veterinary morgues and
martini bars.
She has taught in
the creative writing programs at the University of
Memphis and the University of Pittsburgh; she’s also
taught science journalism in NYU’s graduate
Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.
. . .. Skloot lives in Memphis. She regularly abandons
city life to write in the hills of West Virginia, where
she tends to find stray animals and bring them home.—Rebecca
Skloot Bio
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Video and Film
The
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Book Tour Part 1
Author Rebecca Skloot (RebeccaSkloot.com) hit the road
on January 29, 2010 for The Immortal Book Tour, a
four-month self-organized grassroots tour for her newly
published New York Times bestselling book,
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, about the immortal HeLa cells: Doctors took her cells without asking. Those
cells never died. They launched a medical revolution and
a multimillion-dollar industry. More than twenty years
later, her children found out. Their lives would never
be the same.
Here, a video trailer with footage and photos from Part
I of The Immortal Tour, featuring footage of
Henrietta Lacks's family discussing the book, Henrietta, and HeLa.
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Charlene Gilbert.
Colored
Bodies: Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa Cells—An
experimental documentary on bioethics explored through
the story of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother
of five who made medical history in1951 when researchers
discovered the first immortal cell line in her body.—Media
Artists
posted 28 July 2010
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Anarcha's
Story
By
Alexandria C. Lynch, MS III
Quickly, he forces her to spread her legs so that
he can exam her damaged
vagina. She is
unable to say anything as he pokes and prods in her most
private areas. She
lies there in that backyard hospital and waits while
he completes his initial examination.
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How the GOP Became the White Man’s Party /
The Southern Strategy Comes of Age
Steele Admits "Southern Strategy" /
Rachel Maddow—Steele admits GOP southern strategy
The Southern
Strategy /
Nixon's Southern Strategy
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's
wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in
1937, after her cousin was falsely accused
of stealing a white man's turkeys and was
almost beaten to death. In 1945, George
Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled
Florida for Harlem after learning of the
grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie
party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing
Foster made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for the
United States Army and couldn't operate in
his own home town." Anchored to these three
stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively
researched study of the "great migration,"
the exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into the
novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling,
and Pershing settling in new lands, building
anew, and often finding that they have not
left racism behind. The drama, poignancy,
and romance of a classic immigrant saga
pervade this book, hold the reader in its
grasp, and resonate long after the reading
is done. |
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 2 March 2012
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