In telling Henrietta’s story, Skloot draws from primary sources and personal interviews to provide insightful narrative accounts of Henrietta’s childhood, young adulthood, diagnosis, illness, and tragic death. Her investigation of the true story behind HeLa eventually led her to form significant––and in some cases, life-changing––relationships with the surviving members of the Lacks family, especially Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah. His casual remark sparked Skloot’s interest, and led to a research project that would take over a decade to complete. Thirty-seven years after Henrietta’s death, sixteen-year-old Rebecca Skloot was a high school student sitting in a biology class when her instructor mentioned that HeLa, the first immortal human cell line ever grown in culture, had been taken from an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks. Her family had no idea that part of her was still alive, growing vigorously in laboratories-first at Johns Hopkins, and eventually all over the world. Less than a year after her initial diagnosis, Henrietta succumbed to the ravages of cancer and was buried in an unmarked grave on her family’s land. Until this point, all of Gey’s attempts to grow a human cell line had ended in failure, but Henrietta’s cells were different: they never died. Those cells, he hoped, would allow scientists to unlock the mysteries of cancer, and eventually lead to a cure for the disease. Gey was conducting experiments in an attempt to create an immortal line of human cells that could be used in medical research. As she lay on the operating table, a sample of her cancerous cervical tissue was taken without her knowledge or consent and given to Dr. In 1950, Henrietta Lacks, a young mother of five children, entered the colored ward of The Johns Hopkins Hospital to begin treatment for an extremely aggressive strain of cervical cancer. Teachers: If you’d like a printable version of this guide, download the PDF attachment at the bottom of this page.
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