The NC State University Common Reading Selection Committee has
chosen The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (http://rebeccaskloot.com/the-immortal-life/)
as the shared summer reading for the 2011 entering class.
About The
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (excerpt from website description)
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.