Welcome back to another great year of reading at The Peck School. I read a lot of really wonderful books over the summer, some of which I will discuss on this blog this year! If you look on the right side of this page, you will see a complete list of the books that I will highlight each month this school year. I encourage you to read them, and offer your thoughts in the comment section below each entry. You can also see posts from last year if you are looking for more great books to read!
I am going to start off the year with an amazing work of nonfiction. The extraordinary thing about this book is, even though it delves deeply into medical ethics, biology, and cell culture, it reads like a novel. Don't let the heavy scientific nature of this work scare you off. Scientific writer Rebecca Skloot spent 10 years doing the research for this book. While the scientific nature of the book is important, Skloot bring forth the very human side of the story of the "HeLa" cell culture line. With this book, Henrietta Lacks is finally getting the recognition she deserves for her contribution to science and the great sacrifice she made. See a full description below, and enjoy this wonderful book!
From the Publisher:
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. Now Rebecca Skloot takes
us on an extraordinary journey, from the "colored" ward of Johns
Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark 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" until 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 human 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 legal battles over whether we control
the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story,
Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family-especially
Henrietta's daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her
mother's cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned
her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with
viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie,
who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her
mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford
health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and
impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lackscaptures the
beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human
consequences.
