Skloot, Rebecca (Author)
Crown Publishers
Physical Details: 369
Language: English
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks is buried in an unmarked grave. Her family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. The story of the Lacks family 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. (Publisher)
...MoreReview Littlefield, Melissa M.; Pollock, Anne (August 2011) Review of "The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks". Social Studies of Science (pp. 609-618).
Similar Citations
Book
Holloway, Karla F. C.;
(2011)
Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics
(/isis/citation/CBB001200198/)
Chapter
Wald, Priscilla;
(2012)
Cells, Genes, and Stories: HeLa's Journey from Labs to Literatur
(/isis/citation/CBB001251794/)
Book
Wailoo, Keith;
(2011)
How Cancer Crossed the Color Line
(/isis/citation/CBB001231902/)
Article
Tara Suri;
(2022)
Between Simians and Cell Lines: Rhesus Monkeys, Polio Research, and the Geopolitics of Tissue Culture (1934–1954)
(/isis/citation/CBB316653885/)
Article
Timmermans, Stefan;
(2003)
A Black Technician and Blue Babies
(/isis/citation/CBB000651029/)
Thesis
Savannah L. Williamson;
(2016)
Caring for Human Property: A Medical Biography of American Slavery, 1808-1865
(/isis/citation/CBB893771102/)
Article
Laura Stark;
(2018)
Contracting Health: Procurement Contracts, Total Institutions, and the Problem of Virtuous Suffering in Post-war Human Experiment
(/isis/citation/CBB742387420/)
Book
Johnson, Lenworth N.;
Daniels, O. C. Bobby;
(2002)
Breaking the Color Line in Medicine: African Americans in Ophthalmology
(/isis/citation/CBB000301576/)
Article
Gortier, Leon;
Weininger, Stephen J.;
(2010)
Chemical Relations: William and Lawrence Knox, African American Chemists
(/isis/citation/CBB001021098/)
Book
Ridlon, Florence;
(2005)
A Black Physician's Struggle for Civil Rights: Edward C. Mazique, M.D.
(/isis/citation/CBB000550078/)
Book
Gray, Fred D.;
Tuskegee Institute, ;
(2002)
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The Real Story and Beyond
(/isis/citation/CBB000201837/)
Book
Washington, Harriet A.;
(2006)
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
(/isis/citation/CBB000741867/)
Article
Comfort, Nathaniel;
(2009)
The Prisoner as Model Organism: Malaria Research at Stateville Penitentiary
(/isis/citation/CBB000954223/)
Article
Crenner, Christopher;
(2012)
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the Scientific Concept of Racial Nervous Resistance
(/isis/citation/CBB001250116/)
Thesis
Becsei Kilborn, Eva;
(2003)
Going against the Grain: Francis Peyton Rous (1879--1970) and the Search for the Cancer Virus
(/isis/citation/CBB001562030/)
Article
Doyle, Dennis;
(2009)
“A Fine New Child”: The Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic and Harlem's African American Communities, 1946--1958
(/isis/citation/CBB000930501/)
Article
Dennis A. Doyle;
(2015)
Black Celebrities, Selfhood, and Psychiatry in the Civil Rights Era: The Wiltwyck School for Boys and the Floyd Patterson House
(/isis/citation/CBB957859607/)
Book
James Michael Brodie;
(1993)
Created Equal: The Lives and Ideas of Black American Innovators
(/isis/citation/CBB935934498/)
Book
Wilson, Frank Harold;
(2004)
Race, Class, and the Postindustrial City: William Julius Wilson and the Promise of Sociology
(/isis/citation/CBB000470189/)
Book
Spangenburg, Ray;
Moser, Diane;
(2003)
African Americans in Science, Math, and Invention
(/isis/citation/CBB000301512/)
Be the first to comment!