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Loading... The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacksby Rebecca Skloot
  
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 ryner | May 13, 2022 |  Great read start to end. I keep losing my copy. People just don't return it. I learned alot and enjoyed the story. (  ) paworkingmom | May 3, 2022 | I wanted to be a geneticist for a long time in late teens/early 20s so the scientific stuff is just so interesting. I'm simply horrified at the treatment blacks, poor, etc were given and how they were regarded for testing in medical field. So much of the story is sad but I also wonder how far we would be in medical research, curing diseases,etc without her cells even though she didn't give the approval for removal of them. I'm going to steal a bit of my friend's review of this book because I agree with her and she writes so well! ;-) Here goes: I learned very little about Henrietta, yet more than I ever care to know about her degenerate and often dim children. Skloot gave a better description of her attempt to contact and persuade the Lacks family to work with her than she did fleshing Henrietta out as a person. This was the story of Henrietta's daughter learning about her mother and her sister. The best part about this book was the Afterword, which delved into the philosophical and ethical questions surrounding the growth and use of the HeLa cells to aid Science; court cases and legal precedents were cited. I found that completely enthralling. I didn't care about a single one of Henrietta's family members, especially her philandering husband (also her cousin) who repeatedly gave her syphilis and gonorrhea. No doubt the HPV virus was a bit of his doing and caused the tumor that killed her. The first parts of the book were interesting enough to hold my attention, then it all devolved into idiocy. There was the obligatory laying-on-of-hands and the divine-hand-of-Henrietta-through-her-cells nonsense. Science, for all its promotion in the book and multiple examples of diseases cured and diseases now treatable and vaccines, took a back seat toward the end to the proverbial higher power at work. Perhaps if Deborah hadn't relied on Science after her stroke or Benadryl after her hives, the amazing HeLa cells would have flown to the rescue. They're cells, not embodiments of the wishes of the living organism from which they came. I have many reasons why the Lacks family should not be financially compensated for their mother's cells. I won't go into them because they are both legion and blunt. There was also too much black vs. white discussion in here. Science didn't care who the cells came from. No one returned them when they found out they came from a black woman. The argument is all in the heads of the Lacks family (about all that is in there, in fact). (  ) WellReadSoutherner | Apr 6, 2022 | This would be a great book to teach with the right group of kids. ( ) leahsusan | Mar 26, 2022 | Very interesting story, but I love nonfiction that reads as fiction. Too much detail but I realize that was to prove the point of the author's intention and to verify the story. ( ) WiseOwlFactory | Feb 20, 2022 |
 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. I put down Rebecca Skloot’s first book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” more than once. Ten times, probably. Once to poke the fire. Once to silence a pinging BlackBerry. And eight times to chase my wife and assorted visitors around the house, to tell them I was holding one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time. Writing with a novelist's artistry, a biologist's expertise, and the zeal of an investigative reporter, Skloot tells a truly astonishing story of racism and poverty, science and conscience, spirituality and family, all driven by a galvanizing inquiry into the sanctity of the body and the very nature of the life force. Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in a “colored” hospital ward in Baltimore in 1951. She would have gone forever unnoticed by the outside world if not for the dime-sized slice of her tumor sent to a lab for research eight months earlier. ... Skloot, a science writer, has been fascinated with Lacks since she first took a biology class at age 16. As she went on to earn a degree in the subject, she yearned to know more about the woman, anonymous for years, who was responsible for those ubiquitous cells.... 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. Has as a reference guide/companion
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks is buried in an unmarked grave. Her family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. The story of the Lacks family is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)616.02774092 — Technology and Application of Knowledge Medicine and health Diseases Pathology; Diseases; Treatment First aid; Emergency; Euthanasia Stem cellsLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.15)
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Book Discussion: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks ~ SPOILER FREE~
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This story was an absolute page-turner (I finished in just two days), but engrossing in the way one finds it difficult to look away from something simultaneously fascinating and horrible. I cannot imagine the nightmarish shock felt by the Lacks family upon learning that medical researchers had essentially been keeping part of her mother alive for years following her death, which had already been an intensely painful experience for them, and in addition learning that her cells had been bought and sold for a profit of billions of dollars. This book exposes the enormous ethical entanglement surrounding the use of human cells for research without patient permission, despite it being not technically illegal to do so. My heart ached for this family and their experience, and I felt compelled afterward to donate to the Henrietta Lacks Foundation. (