Rebecca Skloot’s book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was our 2010-2011 One Book, One College selection. We held a range of public programming around this text.
Today, Henrietta Lacks has been back in the news. More precisely, her family and her genome have been in the news. The HeLa gene has been sequenced, and the National Institutes of Health have come to an agreement with the Lacks family on controlling the use of that genome. This is a significant step in the Lacks family story.
Read more about this story here:
NPR: Decades After Lacks’ Death, Family Gets A Say On Her Cells
New York Times: A Family Consents to a Medical Gift, 62 Years Later