Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, 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, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia - a land of wooden quarters for enslaved people, faith healings, and voodoo - to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. They're not entitled to money from HeLa cells, but they are entitled to getting a decent education that gives them the chance to understand basic biology.Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. The Lacks' family situation is really a separate issue - it's a failure of education and social structure keeping people in poverty, and is not related to Henrietta Lacks giving up her cells. While the cells themselves have been used extensively, even started a new industry, it would all be more palatable (and ethical) if Henrietta Lacks understood that her cells were no longer hers. At the very least, there should be an opt-out policy (you can have a part of your body removed, but the hospital is obligated to dispose of it.the author gets into this towards the end of the book). But the troubling part is that Henrietta Lacks basically had her cells stolen from her.she never consented to having the cells removed from her and being used in that way.
I don't think that the family is entitled to money though, and I tend to agree with the stance that when a portion of your body is removed by a physician or hospital, it is no longer your property. The author actually did set up a fund ( ) to donate a part of proceeds from the book to families like the Lacks' family. I think that was partly the author's point in writing it - it would have been an entirely different story of the family had been middle class or college educated and understood at least the basics of what was going on with her cells.
#THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS PDF MOVIE#
"they talking about genes and taking them from cells to bring that dinasaur back to life and I'm like oh Lord I got a paper on how they were doin that with my mother's cell too!" She held up another videocassette, this one a made-for-tv movie called The Cloneĭid anyone get a similar reaction to reading the book?ĭefinitely had a similar reaction reading the book a few years ago. "I saw this movie a bunch of times," she said. But Deborah waved her hand in my facing, shushin me like I was talking nonsense, then fished a videocassette for the pile and held it up for me to see. Deborah thinks they there are clones of her mother made by scientists.ĭeborah raised her eyebrows at me like See? I told you! I started saying it was just Henrietta's cells scientists had cloned, not Henrietta herself.
This is an excerpt in which Deborah Lacks (Henrietta's daughter) is talking to the author about cloning. Here is an example of what I'm talking about. When I read about them I felt anger, frustration, and sympathy all at the same time. I don't know if society had let these people down or if it is a cycle of poverty issue. But I found the decedents of Henrietta to be very scientifically illiterate. This cell line was used in testing Salk's polio vaccine and other medical discoveries. While I really did enjoy this book, I found the juxtaposition of the scientific uses for the HeLa line and the Lacks family themselves unnerving. It concerns the life and death of Henrietta Lacks and the immortal HeLa cell line created from her cervical cancer. It is a non-fiction book released in 2010. Has anyone else read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
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