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The New York Times today has a review of a book called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks that sounds absolutely fascinating.
It’s the true story of a young black woman in the south who had cervical cancer. Doctors took some cells from her body without her knowledge as she was dying circa 1950, and it turns out that those cells, as well as others from her family members, have been used in countless medical studies since then.
Bought and sold and shipped around the world for decades, HeLa cells are famous to science students everywhere. But little has been known, until now, about the unwitting donor of these cells. Mrs. Lacks’s own family did not know that her cells had become famous (and that people had grown wealthy from marketing them) until more than two decades after her death, after scientists had begun to take blood from her surviving family members, without their informed consent, in order to better study HeLa.
I want to read.
Also, does this remind anybody else of Tananarive Due’s Immortals series, about the east Africans with immortal cells/blood?
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I am so glad I never bought a Kindle.
See this Gizmodo post for more details.
That iBooks store (#SteveJobsruleseverythingaroundme) looks pretty fly.
Are Amazon and Sony quaking in their boots? Probably not, but I’m sure they’re not happy about this.
Set your DVRs, people!
In just a few weeks (Feb. 21 at 8 p.m. ET), the TV movie Sins of the Mother will air on Lifetime. It stars Jill Scott.
Haven’t heard of Sins of the Mother? Well, maybe you remember it as Orange Mint and Honey, by kick-butt novelist (and friend of this blog) Carleen Brice.
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