By Greg Braggin and Natalie McClure
The Silicon Valley ACS Book Club will meet on Zoom in January to discuss The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. All are welcome to join the SVACS Book Club! Use our Doodle Poll to indicate your preference for the meeting date and time. To join this discussion group, sign up for email alerts at svacs-book-club@googlegroups.com. If you have any questions, contact Greg Braggin (gregbraggin@yahoo.com) or Natalie McClure (nmcclure@drugregulatoryaffairs.com).
About The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: “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, in vitro fertilization, 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.
Made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, this New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks 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. It’s a story 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’re made of.”
