THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS
Rebecca Skloot
Crown
ISBN 978-1-4000-5217-2
369 pages
$26
Reviewed by Eric Roston
By early 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a mother of five in Baltimore, had suffered for some time from what she described as a painful "knot on my womb." She sought treatment at Johns Hopkins, a charity hospital and the only one around that treated black patients. The diagnosis: cervical cancer. Before administering radium for the first time, the attending doctor cut two dime-size samples of tissue, one cancerous and one healthy, from Lacks' cervix. No one asked permission or even informed her. The doctor gave the tissue to George Gey, a scientist who had been trying to establish a ...
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