Buy The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot as an ebook at Border.
Abstract
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a penniless Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her ancestors, yet her cells–taken without her knowledge–became one of the most key tools in medicine. The prototypical “immortal” human cells grown in society, they are still active today, tho’ she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could yarn all HeLa cells e’er grown onto a withdraw, they’d weigh more than 50 millionunit tons–as more as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were essential for the polio immunogen; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb\s effects; helped boost to advances suchlike in vitro enrichment, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and oversubscribed by the trillions.
Now Wife Skloot takes us on an fantastic travelling, from the colored ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, vanishing hometown of Clover, Virginia-a area of wooden slave lodging, belief healings, and voodoo-to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and battle with the heritage of her cells.
Henrietta’s family did not acquire knowledge of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her spouse and children in explore without educated respond. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar manufacture that sells human biological materials, her ancestry never saw any other profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the tale of the Lacks family-past and present-is inextricably connected to the account of inquiry on African Americans, the alteration of bioethics, and the eligible battles over whether we control the things we are made of.
Over the decade it took to reveal this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family-especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to acquire about her parent’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her parent? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her parent was so weighty to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?
Intimate in intuition, impressive in ambit, and unrealizable to put eat, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.