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. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family - past and present - 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. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. 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. 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 quarters for enslaved people, faith healings, and voodoo - to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. 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. 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. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her enslaved ancestors, yet her cells-taken without her knowledge-became one of the most important tools in medicine. James joins in and tells the congregation that the focus is now on the next generation and how they'll all know what their great-grandmother did for the world.Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Skloot is uncomfortable, but she does it.During the service, Deborah's husband James asks Skloot to speak about the HeLa cells. Not long after, Skloot attends the baptism of Sonny's granddaughter.But she's still determined to help Skloot with her research. Deborah recovers fully, but she's a lot weaker.Her grandson Davon keeps her conscious on the way to the hospital by slapping her face. A few days later, Deborah has a stroke at church.She's also upset because the Henrietta Lacks conference was cancelled and not rescheduled.The conference was going to be held in Washington, D.C.Her imprisoned son Alfred is about to go on trial for some serious crimes, and her nephew is also in trouble. Then her brothers start fussing at her about talking to people about Henrietta.She's decided to go back to school so that she can understand more of the science behind the HeLa cells. But Deborah doesn't seem to be able to avoid stress.Deborah's also supposed to give a speech at the National Foundation for Cancer Research conference.
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