The Chicago Council on Science and Technology & Children's Memorial Research Center Present:
Lecture and book signing with author Rebecca Skloot
The Immortal Life of HEnrietta LAcks
Tuesday November 16, 2010
Northwestern University
Chicago Campus
Thorne Auditorium
375 East Chicago Ave.
Discounted parking is available to the first 150 attendees at the 222 E. Huron St. garage.
5pm Members-Only Reception
** TO BECOME A MEMBER CLICK HERE**
6pm Presentation - book signing to follow
$20 for Members - $30 Non-Members
Rebecca Skloot
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 effects of the atom bomb; 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?