![]() Losing her when they were all too young to fend for themselves, Henrietta’s children only learned of their mother’s remarkable health care legacies decades later, when her real name was finally revealed and various opportunists came sniffing around for descendants who could provide them with the backstory of the mother of modern biomedicine. It is no exaggeration to say that everyone whose family has sought medical care over the last half-century has benefitted, in one way or another, from Henrietta Lacks.īut, as both the book and the film make clear, it is also no exaggeration to say that those benefits almost completely excluded Henrietta’s own children, the ones whom she would have most wished to benefit from the billion-dollar industries that her cells helped to give birth to. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks carefully combines motifs of exclusion and inclusion as it evokes the story of a woman whose cancer cells miraculously survived her, giving birth to a biomedical industry that would go on to develop a host of new treatments - ranging from the polio vaccine to in vitro fertilization to AIDS cocktails and beyond - that were specifically enabled by the HeLa cells (the name taken from the first two letters of Henrietta Lacks’s names). Wolfe and HBO Films have now collaborated to bring an inevitably incomplete but still lovely, loving film version of Skloot’s complex and compelling book to the screen. Exclusion and Inclusionĭirector George C. Which is to say, in Skloot’s book too, the manifold sins of American racism have to be dealt with honestly, openly, and communally before we among the living can hope to help our ghosts finally rest in some sort of peace. In Skloot’s book too, we read about a black woman whose body was treated as a means of profit without her consent - with massive, generation-spanning consequences for her children and theirs. ![]() ![]() In her 2010 nonfiction bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot spins out another complex American ghost story that both renews and deepens several of Morrison’s central themes. Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison lends this resonant observation to a supporting character in Beloved, her brilliant 1988 American ghost story of a novel about Sethe, a woman who has heroically escaped slavery but who still must find a way to make peace with the restless, harrowing spirits of the violent past before she can finally create a new, free life of her own. “You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground.” ![]()
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