floods over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had managed to distill and purify the more addictive qualities of Erin Brockovich, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The Andromeda Strain. One of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I've read in a very long time. Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance? Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family-especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah. 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 legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent.
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.
HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping and have been bought and sold by the billions.
She was 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 "immortal" human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review - Entertainment Weekly - O: The Oprah Magazine - NPR - Financial Times - New York - Independent (U.K.) - Times (U.K.) - Publishers Weekly - Library Journal - Kirkus Reviews - Booklist - Globe and Mail NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO(R) STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE - ONE OF THE "MOST INFLUENTIAL" (CNN), "DEFINING" (LITHUB), AND "BEST" (THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) BOOKS OF THE DECADE - ONE OF ESSENCE'S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS - WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NONFICTION The same is likely true of at lest on other study called "The Use of Deep Temporal Leads in the Study of Psychomotor Epilepsy," which involved inserting metal probes into patients' brains.#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "The story of modern medicine and bioethics-and, indeed, race relations-is refracted beautifully, and movingly."-Entertainment Weekly Bases on the number of patients listed in the pneumoencephalography studyand the years it was conducted, Lurz told me later, it most likely involved every epileptic child in the hospital including Elsie. "There is no evidence that the scientists who did research on patients at Crownsville got consent from either the patients of their parents. Because pneumoencephalography could cause permanent brain damage and paralysis, it was abandoned in the 1970s. the side effects-crippling headaches, dizziness, seizures, vomiting-lasted until the body naturally refilled the skull with spinal fluid, which usually took two to three months. Pneumoencephalography involved drilling holes into the skulls of research subjects, draining the fluid surrounding their brains, and pumping air or helium into the skull in place of the fluid to allow crisp X-rays of the brain through the skull. That fluid protects the brain from damage, but makes it very difficult to X-ray, since images taken through fluid are cloudy. I later learned that while Elsie was at Crownsville, scientists often conducted research on patients there without consent, including one study titled "Pneumoencephalographic and skull X-ray studies in 100 epileptics." Pneumoencephalography was a technique developed in 1919 for taking images of the brain, which floats in a sea of liquid.
0 kommentar(er)
