Time for some nonfiction reading. I heard about this book by Rebecca Skloot from my daughter, a biologist, and then from a fellow violist in the orchestra. In the 1950s, a young black, pregnant woman in Baltimore went to Johns Hopkins Hospital and was found to have cervical cancer. The tumor was so invasive that the doctor found it interesting and took some of the cells to study. Henrietta had no idea he had done this.These cells, called HeLa (for HEnrietta LAcks) not only survived in culture, but were so amazing that they reproduced easily and ended up being used in hundreds of thousands of experiments - even to this day.
Skloot took ten years researching and writing this book which is part biology, part biography, part ethics, all rolled into one quite interesting story.
2 comments:
This sounds like an interesting book.I'm now reading The Girl Who Played with Fire.
The odd thing about the version available here is that the picture that is mentioned over and over and over in the book (hands on hips, etc.), is not only not on the cover, it isn't even among the pictures in the center.
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