HeLa Cells and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

I had the pleasure of being one of the fact-checkers and proof reviewers on Rebecca Skloot's book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and I'm pleased to see that it is now on the NY Times Bestseller list and that Rebecca is well into her book tour.   Rebecca retells the story of Henrietta Lacks and her family and masterfully weaves it into compelling story, that rivets your attention and illustrates just how far we've come in and how far yet we have to go in human subject experimentation.   Here is a short excerpt to whet your appetite:[On January 29, 1951, David Lacks sat behind the wheel of his old Buick, watching the rain fall. He was parked under a towering oak tree outside Johns Hopkins Hospital with three of his children —two still in diapers—waiting for their mother, Henrietta. A few minutes earlier she'd jumped out of the car, pulled her jacket over her head, and scurried into the hospital, past the "colored" bathroom, the only one she was allowed to use. In the next building, under an elegant domed copper roo f, a ten-and-a-half-foot marble statue of Jesus stood, arms spread wide, holding court over what was once the main entrance of Hopkins. No one in Henrietta's family ever saw a Hopkins doctor without visiting the Jesus statue, laying flowers at his feet, saying a prayer, and rubbing his big toe for g ood luck. But that day Henrietta didn't stop.She went straight to the waiting room of the gynecology clinic, a wide-open space, empty but ...
Source: Women's Bioethics Blog - Category: Medical Ethics Tags: HeLa Cells Henrietta Lacks human subject experimentation Immortal Life Rebecca Skloot Source Type: blogs