The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Beschreibung

Broschiertes Buch
Now a major motion picture from HBO starring Oprah Winfrey and Rose Byrne. Her name welches Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She welches 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. The first “bleibend” philanthropisch cells grown in culture, they are schweigsam alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons-as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were quicklebendig for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like im Reagenzglas fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried non… unmarked grave. Now Rebecca Skloot takes us oben angeführt extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Klinik in the 1950s to phantastisch 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 her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” non… more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells philanthropisch biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family-past and present-is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the gesetzlich battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of….