Next up for our book club is Skloot’s ‘Immortal Life’
January 9, 2012 1:56PM
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
Updated: January 25, 2012 5:54PM
The next book live chat for the Pioneer Page Turners online book club will take place at 7 p.m. Feb. 2 and will feature The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Henrietta Lacks, an African-American tobacco farmer in the south, played a vital role in the development of the polio vaccine, as well as advances in gene mapping, in vitro fertilization and cloning. But she never knew it. Diagnosed with cervical cancer in January, 1951, neither she nor her family were aware that the doctor had taken cells from her cancerous cervix during her radiation treatments and sent them to a researcher, Dr. George Otto Gey. Gey found that those cells, unlike the cells of other people, could be kept alive and even continue to grow. Though Lacks died in October 1951, the cells live on. Now known as the HeLa immortal cell line, those cells have led to a multi-million dollar industry of human biological materials. Profits of that industry have never reached Lacks’ family, who also found themselves being used in research without their consent. Author Rebecca Skloot takes us on a journey that examines issues of race, class, poverty, medical ethics and family and reminds us that there’s always a “human” story behind “human biological materials.”
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