The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is now available for free ePub download or online reading.<\/p>\n
Intro:<\/strong><\/p>\n 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 enslaved ancestors, yet her cells\u2014taken without her knowledge\u2014became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first \u201cimmortal\u201d 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\u2019d weigh more than 50 million metric tons\u2014as 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\u2019s effects, helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping, and have been bought and sold by the billions.<\/p>\n Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.<\/p>\n Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the \u201ccolored\u201d ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells, from Henrietta\u2019s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia \u2014 a land of wooden quarters for enslaved people, faith healings, and voodoo \u2014 to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.<\/p>\n Henrietta\u2019s family did not learn of her \u201cimmortality\u201d 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 \u2014 past and present \u2014 is inextricably connected to the history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.<\/p>\n Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family\u2014especially Henrietta\u2019s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother\u2019s 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\u2019t her children afford health insurance?<\/p>\n Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks<\/i> captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.. First published February 2, 2010. Original format: Hardcover. Pages: 370. #the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks-ebook #the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks-epub #read #download<\/p>\n User Rating: 4.11 (based on 708526 ratings)<\/p>\n Download EPUB The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot<\/strong><\/p>\n \ud83d\udcc1 File details: the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks.epub<\/em><\/p>\n