In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer with cervical cancer, unknowingly donated her cells to science. Since then, her "HeLa" cells have been used to develop vaccines, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and many more technologies. Her cells have helped in generating million dollar scientific advancements, yet her family remains in poverty.Rebecca Skloot wrote a nonfiction book about the life of Henrietta Lacks and the ethics surrounding the HeLa cell line. The book, titled The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, contains photos and documents, as well as scientific and historical research. This story exposes a new field of ethics--bioethics--and the societal and legal implications that are bound to arise as we progress into an era where we must determine who owns our DNA: us or science.
In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot captures the scientific, legal, and historical worlds, pulsing back and forth between them with each new chapter, weaving them closer together until they eventually collide. Although the book was published in 2010, Skloot conceived the idea when she was only sixteen years old. Her biology teacher had just taught the class the basics of cell division, and how it only takes one slight change in a protein to set the whole cycle off-balance, ultimately causing cancer. Almost as an afterthought, her instructor explained that these discoveries were made possible by studying a particular line of cancer cells: HeLa cells. Her instructor explained that although HeLa cells were the source of a wealth of medical knowledge, not much was known about their source. And just like that, Skloot’s curiosity was born. “Where was [Henrietta Lacks] from?” Skloot asked herself, as well as “Did she know how important her cells were [and] did she have any children?”
I chose this book because of the controversy regarding HeLa cell contamination of human cell lines. Entire studies have been falsified due to the identification of HeLa contamination in the cell lines being used. Further still, contamination in one study can lead to the falsification of data obtained from later studies that cited the initial study in which contamination was discovered.
Hi, Kelley:
ReplyDeleteThe blogs looks like it's coming along nicely. The writing is suited well to the posting format. Quick, informative, engaging, and easy to absorb. I'd want you pay attention to the visual style a bit more. See if you can convert or switch out your background image for a header or banner, as the background makes the text of the posts difficult to read. I'd also recommend trying importing images into a few posts.
Work a bit more with the format too. I appreciate the hypertext links, but sophisticated bloggers don't generally emphasize the presence of the link so much as identify a key moment in the text to link, knowing that savvy readers will recognize the hyperlink immediately.
The book was definitely the run-away science writing hit of a couple years ago, though I haven't read it. I look forward to seeing what you have to say about it.