Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

This is when I become convinced that we should archive and catalog everything that has ever existed, so that when something amazing happens that no one could have ever predicted, we can follow all of its minute details from creation to fruition, just like Rebecca Skloot did for Henrietta Lacks.

Tying Henrietta's story to the rampant unethical experimentation on unknowing, underprivileged people led to the most compelling, though not the most surprising, insights.

Side note: Somewhere near the halfway point, when the story became much more about the discovery and research process and its effects on Henrietta's descendants, and less about Henrietta and the HeLa cells, I started to wonder why the author didn't write herself in as more than a shadow on the wall. It made her start to seem, I don't know, a bit strange? But maybe that's just because I've come to expect that all authors wish to make themselves the main character in their own books. I dunno.

Favorite Quotes

All cancers originate from a single cell gone wrong and are categorized based on the type of cell they start from.

Hennie made life come alive � bein with her was like bein with fun.

Day yelled back, thumping his silver cane of the floor like an exclamation point.

Some of the stories were conjured by white plantation owners taking advantage of the long-held African belief that ghosts caused disease and death. To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping, slave owners told tales of gruesome research done on black bodies, then covered themselves in white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect black people with disease or steal them for research. These sheets eventually gave rise to the white hooded cloaks of the Ku Klux Klan.

As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they're almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer times our cells have left to divide before they die. By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called temoerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of a telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa's immortality...

Like I'm always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can't do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.