Neither Henrietta nor any of her family members knew about the tissue sample-and neither Gey nor Hopkins ever informed them. Gey was the head of the tissue culture department at Hopkins and he'd been trying for years to get cells to divide continuously and infinitely in the lab so that the scientific community could have an inexhaustible supply of human cells to experiment on. In the process, some of the tissue was removed from her tumor and sent down to George Gey's lab at Hopkins to be cultured, or grown, in test tubes. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer and treated with radium and x-ray therapy. Thirty year-Henrietta Lacks sought help in 1951 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for what she called a "knot" on her cervix. Skloot quickly learns that the Lacks family has been badly treated by both media and the scientific community, and that she'll have to earn their trust before they'll allow her to tell their story. It turns out that the Lacks family is very hostile to the idea of speaking to yet another reporter about their wife and mother's famous cells. But she doesn't realize how much backstory and emotional baggage exists until she starts contacting the family and people connected with them. Because there isn't much information about Henrietta and her family, Skloot wants to tell their story. Science writer Rebecca Skloot has always been obsessed with Henrietta Lacks, the African-American woman whose cancer cells were harvested and used to create an immortal cell line for scientific experimentation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |