"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot has been chosen for next year's Edmonds CC Community Read.
As part of the college's Brown Bag Lecture Series, and in partnership with student government, Edmonds CC will welcome several members of the Lacks family to campus on April 23, 2014, to discuss the book and the many important medical, ethical and social issues it raises.
The event is free and open to the public. Students, staff, and the general public are all encouraged all to add this book to their summer reading lists.
Relevent themes
"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" crosses countless disciplines including anthropology, law, business, cultural diversity studies, public health, history, nursing, biology, engineering, allied health, and communications. Relevant themes include medical ethics, civil rights, intellectual property, poverty, family, women, the 1950s, race issues, gender issues, and religion.
It's the true story of Henrietta Lacks' cells, which have been used over the past 60-plus years in numerous worldwide scientific discoveries. Henrietta 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.
Coming soon: A 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 Lacks' cells, from her small, dying hometown of Clover, VA, to east Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.
"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. 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.
More information is available at the author's website.