![]() and Skloot, with clarity and compassion, helps us take the long view. The issues evoked here are giant: who owns our bodies, the use and misuse of medical authority, the unhealed wounds of slavery. What this important, invigorating book lays bare is how easily science can do wrong, especially to the poor. But that did not stop Skloot in her quest to exhume, and resurrect, the story of her heroine and her family. “No one can say exactly where Henrietta Lacks is buried: during the many years Rebecca Skloot spent working on this book, even Lacks’s hometown of Clover, Virginia, disappeared. Rebecca Skloot has crafted a unique piece of science journalism that is impossible to put down-or to forget.” - Seed magazine “The history of HeLa is a rare and powerful combination of race, class, gender, medicine, bioethics, and intellectual property far more rare is the writer than can so clearly fuse those disparate threads into a personal story so rich and compelling. Whether those uncountable HeLa cells are a miracle or a violation, Skloot tells their fascinating story at last with skill, insight and compassion.” -Colette Bancroft, St. ![]() raises important questions about medical ethics. Above all it is a human story of redemption for a family, torn by loss, and for a writer with a vision that would not let go.” -Douglas Whynott, The Boston Globe It is a well-written, carefully-researched, complex saga of medical research, bioethics, and race in America. “ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a fascinating read and a ringing success. Lacks and her family were treated by researchers and about whether patients should control or have financial claims on tissue removed from their bodies.” -Denise Grady, The New York Times raises troubling questions about the way Mrs. by turns heartbreaking, funny and unsettling. ![]() Immortal Life reads like a novel.” -Eric Roston, The Washington Post "Skloot's vivid account begins with the life of Henrietta Lacks, who comes fully alive on the page. ![]() It signals the arrival of a raw but quite real talent.” -Dwight Garner, The New York Times floods over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had managed to distill and purify the more addictive qualities of Erin Brockovich, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The Andromeda Strain. "One of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time. Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family-especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family-past and present-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. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping and have been bought and sold by the billions. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells-taken without her knowledge-became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NONFICTION.ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS.ONE OF THE “MOST INFLUENTIAL” (CNN), “DEFINING” ( LITHUB), AND “BEST” ( THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) BOOKS OF THE DECADE.NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE “The story of modern medicine and bioethics-and, indeed, race relations-is refracted beautifully, and movingly.”- Entertainment Weekly.
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