Life of the Mind - 2011 Selection
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Apdated from http://torch.utk.edu/lifeofthemind
Published just last year, it is the first book written by Rebecca Skloot, an award-winning science writer. It has received wide acclaim, including selection as a New York Times Notable Book and the Amazon.com editors’ choice for the Best Book of 2010, and is being made into a movie, produced in part by Oprah Winfrey.
The book tells of the African-American woman whose cervical cancer cells, taken during a biopsy and cultured without her knowledge or permission in the 1950s, have been integral in developing the polio vaccine, unlocking secrets of cancer and viruses, helping understand the effects of the atom bomb, and contributing to the development of in vitro fertilization, cloning and gene mapping. The cells are known as HeLa, a name derived from the initial letters of her first and last names.
Skloot’s book weaves together many important themes, including African-American history, research, and medical ethics. She explains the science of HeLa cells but also introduces readers to the Lacks family and their journey in understanding what happened to Henrietta.
“Henrietta’s family did not learn of her ‘immortality’ until more than 20 years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent,” Skloot’s website says. “And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits.…The story of the Lacks family—past and present—is 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 are made of.”
Books & Media Similar to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Get DVDs by requesting them by call number (in parentheses) at the Hodges Library circulation desk on the 2nd floor of the library.
Get books by going to the floor that has the call number (in parentheses) you’re looking for:
3rd Floor: A – GF
4th Floor: GN – PR
5th Floor: PS – S
6th Floor: T – V
To borrow books or DVDs, bring your UT ID card to the Hodges Library circulation desk on the 2nd floor of the library.
MEDIA
- BBC Documentary: The Way of All Flesh
- Radiolab: Famous Tumors
- Interviews with Rebecca Skloot:
- NPR’s All Things Considered, “Book Probes ‘Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’”
- NPR’s Fresh Air, “’Henrietta Lacks’: A Donor’s Immortal Legacy”
- Related Films:
- And the Band Played On (DVD: RA644 .A25 S482 2001)
- Erin Brockovich (DVD: PN1997 .E75 2000)
- Miss Evers’ Boys (DVD: PN1997 .M6182 1997)
- Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (DVD: RA448.4 .U53 2008)
- 25 Years After Roots of Soul: Counseling Persons of Black African Ancestry (streaming video at www.lib.utk.edu)
BOOKS
African Americans & Medical History
- Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity
Harry Bruinius (HQ755.5 .U5 B78 2006)
- Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
James H. Jones (R853 .H8 J66 1993)
- In the Blood: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race
Melbourne Tapper (RA645.S53 T37 1999)
- Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
Harriet A. Washington (R853 .H8 W37 2006)
African American History
- Slavery by Another Name
Douglas A. Blackmon (E185.2 .B545 2008)
- Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction
Melissa Fay Greene (HN79 .G42 M354 1991)
- At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement, from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
Danielle L. McGuire (E185.61 .M4777 2010)
- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
Isabel Wilkerson (E185.6 .W685 2010)
Medicine & Ethics
- The Monkey Wars
Deborah Blum (HV4915 .B58 1994)
- The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
Anne Fadiman (RA418.5 .T73 F33 1997)
- Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts
Michele Goodwin (RD120.7 .G66 2006)
- Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics
Karla FC Holloway (RA448.5 .N4 H655 2011)
- Sentenced to Science: One Black Man’s Story of Imprisonment in America
Allen M. Hornblum (R853 .H8 H67 2007)
- Body Hunters: How the Drug Industry Tests Its Products on the World’s Poorest Patients
Sonia Shah (RA401 .D44 S53 2006)
- The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War
Eileen Welsome (RA1231 .R2 W45 1999)
Medicine
- The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
Michel Foucault (online book at http://lib.utk.edu)
- Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance
Atul Gawande (UT Ag-Vet Med Library RC66 .G39 2007)
- The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Steven Johnson (RC133 .G6 J64 2006)
- Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies
Hannah Landecker (QH585.2 .L36 2007)
- Plagues and Peoples
William H. McNeill (RA649 .M3)
- The Emperor of All Maladies
Siddhartha Mukherjee (RC275 .M85 2010)
- The Proteus Effect: Stem Cells and Their Promise for Medicine
Ann B. Parson (QH588 .S83 P37 2004)
- Life Itself: Exploring the Realm of the Living Cell
Boyce Rensberger (QH581.2 .R46 1996)
- A History of Public Health
George Rosen (RA424 .R65)
Biographies
- Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching
Paula J. Giddings (E185.97 .W55 G53 2008)
- Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World
Tracy Kidder (R154 .F36 K53 2004)
- Up from Slavery
Booker T. Washington (E185.97 .W4 A3 1995)
Fiction on Related Themes
- Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese (PS3622 .E744 C87 2009)
- The Help
Kathryn Stockett (PS3619 .T636 H45 2009)
Nonfiction on Related Themes
- The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Book of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
Deborah Blum (HV6555 .U62 N373 2010)
- Random Family
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (HV4046 .N6 L43 2003)
- Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Mary Roach (R853 .H8 R635 2003)
- Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
Timothy B. Tyson (F264 .O95 T97 2004)
Sources:
http://raforall.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-im-reading-immortal-life-of.html
