REBECCA SKLOOT...The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Thursday, April 29 2010, 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Meet Science Journalist/author REBECCA SKLOOT as she discusses and signs THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS
Doctors took her cells without asking. Those cells never died. They launched a medical revolution and a multimillion-dollar industry. More than twenty years later, her children found out. Their lives will never be the same.
Science journalist Skloot makes a remarkable debut with this multilayered story about faith, science, journalism, and grace. It is also a tale of medical wonders and medical arrogance, racism, poverty and the bond that grows, sometimes painfully, between two very different women—Skloot and Deborah Lacks—sharing an obsession to learn about Deborah's mother, Henrietta, and her magical, immortal cells. Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black mother of five in Baltimore when she died of cervical cancer in 1951. Without her knowledge, doctors treating her at Johns Hopkins took tissue samples from her cervix for research. They spawned the first viable, indeed miraculously productive, cell line—known as HeLa. These cells have aided in medical discoveries from the polio vaccine to AIDS treatments. What Skloot so poignantly portrays is the devastating impact Henrietta's death and the eventual importance of her cells had on her husband and children. Skloot's portraits of Deborah, her father and brothers are so vibrant and immediate they recall Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family. Writing in plain, clear prose, Skloot avoids melodrama and makes no judgments. Letting people and events speak for themselves, Skloot tells a rich, resonant tale of modern science, the wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit society's most vulnerable people. Some follow-up books that Eso Won Bookstore recommends are: Medical Apartheid:The "White"History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington; Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Carolyn Elkins; Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis by Jim Jones. Come early!
