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The book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot. Henrietta Lacks was a lady who died of cancer and was more or less unremarkable, except for some reason her cells are immortal and can be bred indefinitely in vitro and this is extremely handy for a lot of biomedical research stuff. There's a lot of interesting biology as to why her cells are immortal, and a lot of interesting medical ethics and legal questions about the practice of taking cell samples, and there's a lot of really weird history around the guys who discovered these cells, and there's a lot of controversy about using HeLa cells cause they're a type of lab weed and can contaminate poo poo and they're not even really human any more and it's all some cray-cray scifi poo poo. So what does Skloot do? Write a half-baked puff piece about her and Henrietta's inbred idiot daughter hanging around in hotel rooms, throw in a half-baked race angle, and then salt the ground so that nobody else can write about it. Genuinely made me angry as I was reading it. Should've been a much more rad book.
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Mar 25, 2016 00:18
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 13:33 |
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