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4.23 AVERAGE
4.23 AVERAGE
informative
reflective
slow-paced
This should be required reading for anyone interested in biomedical sciences, legal studies, and ethics. This is an amazing story of the real people we so easily turn into black and white facts and figures. I could not recommend this book enough.
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
One of my new year's resolutions was to actually write out my reviews. January was a really rough month for me, I didn't actually read any books in January, which is why I am 3 books behind on my reading challenge. I found this book for sale at my local library and picked it up that same day. I'm usually not a non-fiction reader but once I picked this book up, I could NOT put this book down! Skloot did and AMAZING job writing this book. She didn't change anything about this story, she told it exactly as she learned it. I can't wait to read more non-fiction.
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
fast-paced
It’s nice to know that Henrietta Lacks is out there somewhere, even if just in the form of HeLa - she seems like she was a strong and wonderful woman.
I really enjoyed the history of Henrietta and her family’s lives juxtaposed with the science behind HeLa. That being said, at times it felt as though the author jammed herself into the story where she didn’t belong. Hearing her lament about how she couldn’t get ahold of the Lacks family, as though they owed her a response, just rubbed me the wrong way…
But as a whole, I would give this book a 4/5.
I really enjoyed the history of Henrietta and her family’s lives juxtaposed with the science behind HeLa. That being said, at times it felt as though the author jammed herself into the story where she didn’t belong. Hearing her lament about how she couldn’t get ahold of the Lacks family, as though they owed her a response, just rubbed me the wrong way…
But as a whole, I would give this book a 4/5.
challenging
informative
reflective
fast-paced
Interesting Tidbits from the book:
- Her name was originally Loretta Pleasant. Cells could have been called LoPl cells. Tragedy averted.
- Lots of incest among the Lackses. Elsie, Henrietta's daughter who was institutionalized, had all sorts of mental and physical health problems which probably stemmed from her being the offspring of cousins.
- Pheumoencephalography: messed up way of getting brain images in the past. The brain floats in spinal fluid, which makes it difficult to get clear images from X-rays because the fluid made images cloudy. To solve this, pheumoencephalography was the practice of drilling a hole in the skull and draining the fluid so that clear X-rays could be taken. This resulted in serious headaches, seizures, vomiting - lasting for two to three months, until the body naturally refilled the spinal fluid. This went on from the 50s to the 70s, when it was discontinued for being fucking crazy.
- Interesting how differently parents viewed safety back in the 40s compared to today. There was a story in the beginning of the book about how all of the Lacks children used to go swim in a watering hole which they knew was filled with snakes. Crazy.
- Really depressing reading about how HeLa was involved in the creation of the IRB. George Southam's experiments of injecting HeLa cancer cells into sick cancer patients and then healthy prison inmates in order to test whether cancer could be transmitted. This was all done without consent of the test subjects.
- Henrietta's husband, Day, was a real piece of shit. He let Deborah (Henrietta's daughter) be abused by Galen for years (after Henrietta had died).
- HeLa was instrumental in creating the Polio vaccine.
- The origin of the KKK white hoods (p. 165-66): "The Lackses aren't the only ones who heard from a young age that Hopkins and other hospitals abducted black people. Since at least the 1oos, black oral history has been filled with tales of "night doctors" who kidnapped black people for research. And there were disturbing truths behind those stories. Some of the stories were conjured by white plantation ownen taking advantage of the long-held African belief that ghosts caused disease and death. To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping slave owners told tales of gruesome research done on black bodies, then covered themselves in white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect black people with disease or steal them for research. Those sheets eventua gave rise to the white hooded cloaks of the Ku Klux Klan."
- and this evolved into the white hoods of the KKK.