![]() She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. University of Wisconsin, Madison Big Reads University of Richmond One Book, One Campus Program University of North Carolina at Greensboro Rochester Community and Technical College Ohio State Mansfield & North Central State College North Carolina Agriculture and Technical University Germantown Campus of Montgomery College (Maryland) Selected for Common Reading at the following colleges and universities:Ĭalifornia State University Maritime Academyįlorida Atlantic University Honors Collegeįollett Pioneer Bookstore California State University East Bay Selected by the following Community Reads programs:īaton Rouge’s ‘One Book One Community’ Read 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 slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo-to East Baltimore today, where Henrietta’s children, unable to afford health insurance, wrestle with feelings of pride, fear, and betrayal. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they were vital for developing the polio vaccine uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb helped lead to important advances in cloning, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping and have been bought and sold by the billions, with devastating consequences for her family. 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. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa.
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