The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Themes

We know what you're thinking: you don't need a guide on suffering for a book about a woman who died from cervical cancer and had her tissues co-opted by for-profit biotech companies. Good point. Ho...

At first glance, the harvesting of cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks' tumor seems like no big deal. She clearly doesn't want the cancer to remain inside her. And who wouldn't jump at the chance to...

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Skloot has an epiphany when she speaks with cousin Gary in Clover: the devoutly religious Lacks family has a different way of viewing Henrietta's death and...

The science behind the production and use of HeLa cells sounds a lot like a B-grade sci-fi movie. (The media often had fun billing it like that.) However, a lot of tireless experimentation, ingenui...

There's a great moment in The Princess Bride when Inigo Montoya criticizes Vizzini on his repeated use of one word: "You keep using that word," he says, "I do not think it means what you think it m...

Despite Deborah's claim that her mother's story isn't about "white or black," Skloot shows us pretty convincingly in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks that institutionalized racism was alive and...

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the Lacks family has turmoil buried right into the roots of its family tree. As cousin Cliff tells Skloot, the family cemetery is filled with black Lackses...

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, poverty boils down to two things: limited access to basic human necessities and vulnerability to predatory behavior. We learn that both of these things are...

If you attended a talk about, say, simulation of nanostructures for optoelectronic interfaces, you'd probably feel pretty stupid even though you simply never studied this stuff. Science has its own...