Ever hear of HeLa cells?
Me neither. But, apparently, everybody else has.
This book wasn't as good as I
wanted to be. This thing had 999 five-star ratings on Amazon. Five stars ain't easy to come by on Amazon people.
I've had such good luck with Unbroken
and Seabiscuit, that I thought my bad nonfiction luck was over. This book was
good... it just wasn't good enough. The story is about Henrietta Lacks, a poor black
woman who died of cervical cancer before she was 40 years old. Her cells were
harvested without her knowledge and were the first cells to be grown in lab. Henrietta's cells were grown and sold all over the world. They aided countless medical discoveries and research. It would not be an overstatement to say that she changed the course of modern medicine. Meanwhile, her children grew up in poverty and ignorance.
The author heard
about this woman but could not find any information about her. She set out to
find out all she could about Henrietta. It's a sad story really. You can't help but
realize just how much this woman was taken advantage of in life and death. But
the book is full of a lot of technical details that were just a little bit
beyond me. It took me so long to read and I hate to spend more than one week
on a book. It just goes against my nature. That being said, I think Henrietta deserves to be known and I am glad Rebecca Skloot introduced me to her.
No comments:
Post a Comment