Reddit reviews The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
We found 52 Reddit comments about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Rebecca Skloot (Author)The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The story of Henrietta Lacks is super interesting, but also really sad. Her cells were harvested at a blacks only hospital without her consent or notification. Later, the doc who harvested them went on to make buckets of money selling the cell line to researchers all over the place. People still make buckets of money off that line, and her family never saw, and will never see, a dime of it.
It wasn't all bad, though, as her cell line also helped to produce standards for cell culturing/storage/growth/an entire industry that all began with her cell line. It literally started a new era of research.
If you ever get a chance to read Skloot's book give it a read. Very eye-opening for me in terms of patient rights and medical ethics at the time.
EDIT: As /u/Halsfield pointed out, there actually has been a legal development in the situation. Two of her surviving family members now sit on a committee that controls scientific access to the DNA, as well as recognition in published papers using this line. There's no reported financial compensation, but apparently the family wasn't all that interested in cashing in. In fact, it sounds like it's opened up a ton of lucrative speaking engagements for her remaining family. I'm glad to see a happy ending, hats off to Rebecca Skloot. Without her, Henrietta would be nothing more than a footnote in history.
EDIT2: I am not as good with details as I'd hoped. Hopkins, where she was admitted, had a black wing and a white wing, and the Dr. who collected the sample did not make buckets of cash. It did spring a healthy business producing/shipping the cells to other researchers, but buckets of money might not be the best description. For clarity's sake I'm leaving my original comment as is.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, very interesting story about human cell research, the woman whose cells made it possible, and her daughter. It is a compelling true story and describing it makes me want to read it again! And I second (or third) the Mary Roach books; they are sometimes LOL funny.
>The Immortal Life of Hennrietta
Based on the book by the same name by Rebecca Skloot
https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052181
I think you'd find The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a very interesting read.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is one of the more recent NYT bestsellers that is also a pretty good biology read. The Hot Zone is a classic, and although it is dated, it will probably regain some of its formal popularity due to the [current ebola outbreak] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_West_Africa_Ebola_outbreak). I would recommend Creighton if you want a "fun" read, but his works are fictional, predictable, and often infuriatingly inaccurate.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. A poor black tobacco farmer to whom we owe a debt of gratitude, because without her we wouldn't have half the cures to diseases we have today - including the polio vaccine.
More or less exactly what the book about her is about. http://www.amazon.com/The-Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052181
Read this.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Unbroken
And for a 'fiction' work that is all too true...
A Fine Balance
http://www.amazon.com/The-Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052181
This is a very good book, highly recommend. And it touches on the chicken heart.
If you want to read a whole book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" is pretty much all about this, with a few ethical/political viewpoints thrown in. I've read it. It is a bit dull for me but does give the relevant background.
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The story of Henriette Lacks is pretty cool.
I also enjoyed the story of The Girl in the Picture
I have a fondness for british history, in particular the tudor era, the napoleonic era, and the victorian era and those times also have some fascinating women. Elizabeth I comes to mind, I've been meaning to read this novel about her life, having enjoyed the author's take on Hevry VIII. I also watched The Duchess which told the colourful but tragic story of the Duchess of Devonshire.
If you listen to podcasts, you could check out Stuff You Missed In History Class. They've recently done episodes on women like Jane Austen and Yaa Asantewaa. There was a really good one about foot-binding, which wasn't about women in particular but did look very much at how the tradition affected women (and how women propagated this tradition.)
You should read this book.
http://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052181
It's the story of the woman whose cancer was the source of HeLa cells, and her family - because her family shares her genes.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. So while it doesn’t scream “happy birthday,” and I guess it isn’t what you’d call inspiring, I found it both interesting and compelling. Very readable. It got kind of trendy, and apparently Oprah did a thing for HBO, which usually kind of scares me away, but it’s a good book all the same.
Here’s the Amazon link.
Have you seen their Highlights for High School feature?
Also, there are sites like Academic Earth that might be useful.
Here are a few blogs with potential. You'll have to decide for yourself if they have inappropriate content.
Here are a few book recommendations covering various fields, in no particular order (though they should all read #1):
And here's a video interview with Richard Feynman they might enjoy.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is, even with its flaws, I think a deeply compelling and important read about medicine, medical ethics, and America. (I def did some light weeping near the end.)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The New Kings of Nonfiction is a collection of longform journalism edited by This American Life's Ira Glass.
I'm currently reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It's really interesting, here's part of the synopsis:
>Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. 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, they are still 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 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.
>Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.
The Disappearing Spoon is about fascinating stories from the history of the periodic table of elements.
Rebecca Skloot's book about Henrietta Lacks is a really great read. Whole heartedly recommend reading it.
I'm sorry. I know what you're going through is really hard.
Cancer is part of the reason I started reading Stoic philosophy tbh. To calm that animal fear of death we all carry.
I'm coming to that moment in my own life as well. Someone I love very much is very ill and I suspect it will come to this sooner rather than later in our family.
I was thinking, I'll probably be the last of my little family to die. Everyone I love will die before me.
My mother will die- she's very ill.
My husband is much older than me.
My sister is older w approaching health issues of her own.
And my younger brother is struggling w mental illness.
I'll probably have to bury them all one by one someday. I dunno that anyone will be left to bury me.
On my worst days I'm sad about it. I feel sorry for myself. Why me? I never asked for it.
But then on other days, I'm grateful for the opportunity. It's one final duty to discharge, one last chance to honor someone very special in my life.
Who else would I want to shoulder my burden?
If I'm not the one to bury them all, then it'll fall to my brother. I love him but his life is a mess even in the best of times. Leave my sister to do it? Her big heart might crack under the strain.
We shared a little bit of time together and it's been lovely. I can do my part.
The funny thing is I'll be dead soon, too. Whether it's a week from now or 100 years it doesn't much matter I guess. I must've read it somewhere but can't recall where (Marcus Aurelius probably):
'We're all dead already, we just haven't been buried yet.'
I try to live my little chunk of time in a way that will leave people around me with a good memory and a warm feeling in their hearts.
Take my blessings with you. I wish you well! Say hi if you see me somewhere on the other side.
Edit: I'm a big reader. These are the books that helped me through the worst of it. Maybe they can help you, too.
wiki, author discusses book, Amazon
wiki, Amazon
They did try to treat her cancer, using radiation therapy. She had ovarian cancer at first, so they jammed rods of radioactive material up her yoo-hoo. Her cancer was particularly nasty, and even with today's medicine and knowledge it's doubtful there's much they could have done for her by the time she went in.
Her family received next to nothing in compensation for using Henrietta's cells, although they were most definitely aware that Johns Hopkins had taken them and was using them in a business venture. They knew they were being exploited, but were essentially powerless to do anything about it.
Read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for a better understanding.
Sure. A new book is being written about her. Here's one article and the book link.
'HeLa' is a reference to a strain of human cells that labs use for testing. I can strongly recommend this book about their source. It's absolutely fascinating and heartbreaking:
https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052181
How creepy you into? One of my favorite books of the last year was People in the Trees, but it's a little hmmm... dark.
Also recently finished this Henrietta Lacks non-fiction which was good.
Currently reading a shitty crime novel that's pretty addicting, before I get into some 800 page shit I have on deck.
That's pretty tough... I think if I had to pin down one book that really affected me it'd have to be The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Extremely well researched and fantastically written. A great example of well done literary nonfiction!
If you're keen to learn more, there is an excellent book about the woman whose cells were used to create the HeLa line - 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.' When I did research we worked with HeLa cells and it was pretty interesting to hear about the person who 'donated' them.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052181
the book
>Isn't every living thing?
No. I'm actually reading a book about that right now. Good book, pretty entertaining and informative, I recommend.
Came here to say Oliver Sacks (neuroscience).
I picked up a used copy of the DSM-IV casebook; it's very cheap since the DSM-V has come out. Diagnoses may be outdated but the stories are still there!
There are casebooks in other fields, too-- Surgery, multiple specialities, medical ethics, [pediatrics] (http://www.amazon.com/Files-Pediatrics-Fourth-Edition-LANGE/dp/0071766987/ref=pd_rhf_se_s_cp_9_EQ6W?ie=UTF8&refRID=1WJ16SB6971PCJ94TK2S). Your college library ought to have new-ish ones you can read for free.
I'm also encouraged by reading scientific journal articles in medical fields (research is exciting).
Other stuff: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks isn't about a doctor, but it's about a patient and the HeLa cell line that's been so important to medicine. My decision to go into medicine was affected by The Plague, a novel by Albert Camus about a plague-stricken city. (Main character is a doctor, though not exactly a modern MD.)
I pretty much only read non-fiction, so I'm all about books that are educational but also interesting :) I'm not sure what your educational background is, so depending on how interested you are in particular subjects, I have many recommendations.
Naked Statistics and Nate Silver's Book are both good!
Feeling Good is THE book on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.
The Omnivore's Dilemma is good, as is Eating Animals (granted, Eating Animals is aimed at a particular type of eating)
Guns, Germs and Steel is very good.
I also very much enjoyed The Immortal Live of Henrietta Lacks, as well as Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman :)
edit to add: Chris Hadfield's Book which I haven't received yet but it's going to be amazing.
Very much liked
The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat - a book about the discovery of penicillin that aims to correct decades of misinformation
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mold-Dr-Floreys-Coat/dp/0805077782/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341580039&sr=8-1&keywords=mold+in+dr+floreys+coat
Also, for a bioethics book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is great
http://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052181/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341580111&sr=1-1&keywords=henrietta+lacks
Almost anything by Oliver Sacks is fantastic. On The Move was great. I listened to it as an audiobook in lab. Very motivating!
Not a new release, and I know there is some controversy, but I loved The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Middlesex. Fiction, not a new release, but a great story with some science mixed in (I may be biased because I happened to be reading this while taking developmental biology and learning about sex determination).
I love science books. These are all on my bookshelf/around my apt. They aren't all chemistry, but they appeal to my science senses:
I got a coffee table book once as a gift. It's Theodore Gray's The Elements. It's beautiful, but like I said, more of a coffee table book. It's got a ton of very cool info about each atom though.
I tried The Immortal Life of Henrieta Lacks, which is all about the people and family behind HeLa cells. That was a big hit, but I didn't care for it.
I liked The Emperor of all Maladies which took a long time to read, but was super cool. It's essentially a biography of cancer. (Actually I think that's it's subtitle)
The Wizard of Quarks and Alice in Quantumland are both super cute allegories relating to partical physics and quantum physics respectively. I liked them both, though they felt low-level, tying them to high-level physics resulted in a fun read.
Unscientific America I bought on a whim and didn't really enjoy since it wasn't science enough.
The Ghost Map was a suuuper fun read about Cholera. I love reading about mass-epidemics and plague.
The Bell that Rings Light, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, Schrödinger's Kittens, The Fabric of the Cosmos and Beyond the God Particle are all pleasure reading books that are really primers on Quantum.
I also tend to like anything by Mary Roach, which isn't necessarily chemistry or science, but is amusing and feels informative. I started with Stiff but she has a few others that I also enjoyed.
Have fun!
I love these lists that everyone has compiled here, I've seen some amazing books that I've read and have yet to read. But since no one's mentioned this one, I'd to add a book that I think is really significant to AskWomen and the state of our society today:
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It's about how a black woman died of cervical cancer in the 50s, then doctors took her cancer cells to experiment on without telling her family, and they're basically the only human cells to be replicated in the lab without dying so they've been used in all of medicine, including to develop vaccines like polio -- and yet her descendants live without healthcare. It's an amazingly well written, interesting, and exciting book.
Other than that I recommend Mary Roach as an author, she is very fun to read. My favorites are Gulp: Adventures in the Alimentary Canal and Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It was fascinating and read like fiction, despite the fact that the whole thing was non-fiction.
The Rebel Sell: Why The Culture Can't Be Jammed by Joseph Potter and Andrew Heath
The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," The Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction by Rachel P. Maines. A really awesome history of the medicalization of women's orgasms and sexual issues.
Are you looking for a textbook or non-fiction books?
I am a microbiologist so these books are biased towards that:
The Coming Plague. Its a little sensationalist but its a good read.
The Hot Zone This is the book that got me into microbiology and started me on the path to being a microbiologist.
The Immortal Life of Henriatta Lacks Light on the science but still puts a personal context to science especially tissue culture.
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History Good historical look on a disease that we still fear today.
Not a book but check out This Week in Microbiology and This Week in Virology podcasts. Great and informative.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot
I gave my brother (who never EVER reads, and doesn't like "hard books") How to stop time also by Matt Haig, he read it in one sitting and then went out and got the rest of his books and read them all in a couple weeks. Christopher Moore is also great, Sacre Bleu is my favourite.
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for non-fiction: Letter from Birmingham Jailby Martin Luther King, Jr. anything by Audre Lorde or James Baldwin and Anne Frank and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for showing him how to appreciate life.
I just went and stared at my bookshelves and realized that there was a distinct paucity of minority characters.
However, some general recommendations:
feed for the teenager uninterested in the world at large or the dystopian fiction fan.
My Date with Satan Short stories, usually from a female perspective. High schoolers would probably delight in the bad language and messed up characters.
Trickster's Choice; A young adult girl-power fantasy/spy novel with a lot to say about colonialism. My strongest recommendation on this list. Lots of major minority characters also.
Infidel; A heavy-handed memoir about triumph by a woman who "escaped" Somalia and is now a European politician. Controversial for a multitude of reasons and has nothing nice to say about Islam, but you know your students better than I do.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for the scientifically inclined.
Wicked for modern classic fans who'd appreciate deeper meanings.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
It's 400pgs but ridiculously amazing.
Happy birthday!
If you're not down for heights, I think a neat bucket list item is to go on a road trip! Take a long weekend off and go somewhere cheesy, check out the largest bowling pin, take in some weird sights. It's fun, even though its not really possible where I'm from.
As a good non-fiction book, The eternal life of Henrietta lacks. Haven't had a chance to read it, but I love pop science works. I'm not super schooled of microbiology and this seems very nice mix of history, microbio, and a bit of rights of the deceased.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was pretty kickass. It's the story of a woman whose cancer cells were the first to prove "immortal," endlessly being reproduced for research.
Check it out:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052181/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344638032&sr=8-1&keywords=immortal+life+henrietta
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Synopsis: Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more. Henrietta's cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can't afford health insurance. This phenomenal New York Times bestseller tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew.
Mary Roach is another great nonfiction author.
Darn, you beat me by 10 minutes. It was a pretty good book. boop
I thought "On Speed" was a good read. https://www.amazon.com/Speed-Benzedrine-Adderall-Nicolas-Rasmussen/dp/0814776396/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1487033664&sr=8-2&keywords=on+speed
Also, it doesn't get much better than "The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks" https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052181/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1487033763&sr=8-1&keywords=the+secret+life+of+henrietta+lacks
It's a big topic and I'm no expert, but I'm happy to share some of what I know.
When black people were brought here to the US as slaves, they were considered property rather than people. They had no ownership over their bodies. Many female slaves were raped by their slave owners, and left to raise any resulting children (who would become slaves as well, and would sometimes be sold off to another family). White babies were often wet nursed by slaves, to the detriment of black babies.
Before black people were considered people in the US, they were legally considered 3/5 of a person, and having one drop of black blood meant someone was considered black. (Even now, it's why Americans consider President Obama to be black, even though his mother was white.) African Americans have faced generations of disadvantages - sharecropping,
appallingly unethical STI tests, segregation, forced sterilization, redlining, the mass incarceration of black men, and the pay gap for black women. Black people here are still crawling out from under all that. Meanwhile, white politicians lead people to believe black people are to blame for these disadvantages, by trotting out terms like "welfare queen" and "black-on-black crime".
If you're interested in more reading, I recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates's long-form essay "The Case for Reparations". Rebecca Skloot's book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a good look at how US medical and research institutions have treated black people over the course of several generations. Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing (fiction) is an incredible, heartbreaking look at how systemic racism ripples through generations of African Americans.
>The difference between skin cells and a fertilized egg in the womb, as I believe to be correct, is that skin cells (not only being dead), also do not have the same differentiating and human-producing capabilities that a egg does. I don't want to call it a "potential person," I'm calling it a person and saying that it's future development will include the generation of a consciousness and sentience.
And a HeLa Stem Cell Culture?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
They came from a human woman, Henrietta Lacks
https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052181
There are more HeLa cells out there than were ever in Henrietta as a talking, walking, human. But you can't talk to the cells in a petri-dish. and they are alive.
https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052181
It's not a textbook, and perhaps it goes against your "not be popular science" stipulation, but The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is an amazing book... genetics, cancer biology, medicine, some historical perspective of those fields, tied into one real-life family with its own deep story. I think you will find it awesome and accessible.
This isn't heavily science-y and a bit journalized, but I really enjoyed Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadaver's by Mary Roach. I also like Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne. There's a lot of overlap with what he teaches at his UChicago Eco & Evo course. Bad Science by Ben Goldacre is also wonderful, but will likely make you angry. Yet another interesting read is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Here's the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
It was excellent and not at all what you expect. The compelling aftermath of Jim Crow racism that places Mrs. Lacks unwitting sacrifice to science in perspective. And Ms. Skloot breaks every rule of a biographer, and lets the story rope her in.
The little known story of the discovery of the Hela cell line and the woman who unknowingly changed science could not have been without the thoughtful voice of Ms. Skloot.
Please read the The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400052181/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awd_lFFGwb4HMQB9G not justifying or defending anything. I think the Internet is full of Donald Trumps and very rarely a thought out and balanced close look at both sides of the issue. This book did that.