
- The immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot movie#
- The immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot registration#
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine of scientific discovery and faith healing and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew.

The immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot movie#
Soon to be made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, this New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. It’s a story 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’re made of. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine of scientific discovery and faith healing and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells-taken without her knowledge in 1951-became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa.
The immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot registration#
Visit HenriettaLacksFoundation.There is no cost to attend and registration is not required. You can be part of this mission by contributing to the Henrietta Lacks Foundation! The Foundation’s goal is to continue to help individuals and families who – like members of the Lacks family and descendants of the Tuskegee Syphilis Studies survivors – have made contributions to scientific research unwillingly or unknowingly. The Foundation has also awarded education grants to the family members of the survivors of the Tuskegee Syphilis Studies through support of The Voices of Our Fathers Legacy Foundation, whose mission is “To uplift the legacy of the USPHS Study In Macon County by honoring the men in the study and convening their families as a means to preserve history and enrich education in clinical and public health research.” You can read recipient testimonials and learn the stories of some of their grants here. The Foundation has awarded more than 80 grants to nearly 30 qualifying members of Henrietta Lacks’s immediate family. These include grants for health care and dental assistance, tuition and books, job training and maintaining employment, and emergency relief. The Foundation also seeks to promote public discourse concerning the role that contributions of biological materials play in scientific research and disease prevention, as well as issues related to consent, and disparities in access to health care and research benefits, particularly for minorities and underserved communities. The Henrietta Lacks Foundation seeks to provide assistance to individuals and their families who have been directly impacted by such research. These include the Tuskegee Syphilis Studies, the Human Radiation Experiments, and others. Unfortunately, there are numerous examples of historic research studies conducted on individuals-particularly within minority communities-without their knowledge or consent. They became one of the most important tools in medicine-with damaging consequences for her family, many of whom often struggled to get access to the very health care advances their mother’s cells helped make possible.

Established in 2010 by Rebecca Skloot, the Henrietta Lacks Foundation is inspired by the life of Henrietta Lacks, whose cancer cells-code named HeLa-were taken without her knowledge in 1951.
