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reutgirl 's review for:
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has been on my TBR list for a while. There was A LOT to this book and it has some good points and some drawbacks. If you want to feel really angry, make sure you read to the end of the Afterword!
It was a moving story when it talked about the family and all that they had been through before, during, and after Henrietta's illness and death. I found the information about how her cells were maintained and used on research to be fascinating.
The parts that dealt with the circumstances surrounding how her cells came to be "immortal" and much of the scientific information to be overkill for the scope and purpose of this book. I do enjoy a good science lesson, but this was too much and I would have really enjoyed focusing more on the family.
I was enraged at the current (ish - from 2009) state of affairs with informed consent re: your own personal tissue samples and what may happen to them. As soon as you have anything removed from your body, you no longer have any rights to it and it can be used without your knowledge or consent for whatever purposes researchers and scientists want. It can be bought or sold for however much money and you have no right to compensation. Personally I am not ok with that. I feel like I own my DNA and the idea of it being used for research (even genetic research) rubs me the wrong way. Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk.
It was a moving story when it talked about the family and all that they had been through before, during, and after Henrietta's illness and death. I found the information about how her cells were maintained and used on research to be fascinating.
The parts that dealt with the circumstances surrounding how her cells came to be "immortal" and much of the scientific information to be overkill for the scope and purpose of this book. I do enjoy a good science lesson, but this was too much and I would have really enjoyed focusing more on the family.
I was enraged at the current (ish - from 2009) state of affairs with informed consent re: your own personal tissue samples and what may happen to them. As soon as you have anything removed from your body, you no longer have any rights to it and it can be used without your knowledge or consent for whatever purposes researchers and scientists want. It can be bought or sold for however much money and you have no right to compensation. Personally I am not ok with that. I feel like I own my DNA and the idea of it being used for research (even genetic research) rubs me the wrong way. Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk.