Brilliant, Revealing This is an outstanding piece. It should be required reading for any ethics or philosophy class. Skloot is a great educator. Also, she is skilled at balancing science with the personal and intimate side of the human drama. When you read this book, you will receive a revelation. I highly recommend this work of art.
Highly recommend An interesting read about how a woman's cancer cells have impacted medicine. I liked that the author really personalized the issue of ethically using a person's cells without permission, despite a huge benefit to science and medicine. The setting during the civil rights era in Maryland was another interesting piece. The book read like fiction.
Adult Summer Reading The true story of Henrietta Lacks, the impoverished tobacco farm worker African-American woman whose cells are taken without permission--cells which end up being the first immortal human cells. Rebecca makes the science and legalities easy to follow and even interesting and connecting with the family intimately is inevitable.
Adult Summer Reading A real eye opener! I'd heard of Hela genes, but had no idea of the story behind them. This true story opens up many questions of medical ethics and ownership of cell properties. Would highly recommend!
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Truth be told, book club read this a while back and I skipped out that month. I'd heard some discussion about the story line and was pretty confident that, science being one of my two worst subjects, this was not a book for me. But of course the guilt from consciously bailing out of our reading choice has been sitting on my shoulder and nudging me every time I see Henrietta sitting on the library shelf. So last week I checked her out.
While this isn't a book that grabbed hold of my interests and towed me along for the ride, there was definitely something that kept pulling me back in. I continue to sit & shake my head at the segregation practices that were considered "normal" at the time. How can a complete lack of compassion for another human being be considered normal? My dog is treated better than so many individuals were back then. And the scariest part is that I'm sure this line of thinking is still alive and well in many areas.
So many in the science community presented in the book seem completely removed from even a genuine appreciation for Henrietta. What I call a "sense of entitlement" when I see the same haughty attitude in teenagers today. I'm not saying Henrietta did all the work, but let's be totally honest. Without her there would be nothing. It doesn't seem like saying thank you should be that hard. Showing earned respect for what has come from her. Having some compassion for what her family has endured. Yes, her cells were taken without consent or prior knowledge. Yes, legally at the time that was not a crime. But yes if you stop and take a second, things could have been done differently any step along the way just out of respect and common courtesy. Sometimes our own blindness makes things so much harder than they really are.
Would any of the drug companies involved go bankrupt, or even see a dent in their quarterly earnings if they were to offer free prescription drug coverage to one of Henrietta's living children? Just to say thank you?