Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks
(image credit)

Learn more about Henrietta Lacks starting at her Wikipedia page. Below, author Rebecca Skloot talks about her book about Henrietta Lacks and science writing more generally, and historian and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates talks about Henrietta Lacks and the history of medical consent and race.

About the book: "...the science end of this story is enough to blow one's mind... But what's truly remarkable... is that we also get the rest of the story, the part that could have easily remained hidden had she not spent ten years unearthing it: Who was Henrietta Lacks? How did she live? How she did die? Did her family know that she'd become, in some sense, immortal, and how did that affect them?" -Jad Abumrad (founder of the podcast Radiolab)

There's a movie too.