Women's Reading Club

WOMEN'S READING CLUB - FALL PICK

Join us! The Women's Center's Reading Club will be meeting, at a date to be announced shortly, in the Women’s Center (Memorial Gym, 109) for discussion and feminist analysis of the University of Idaho's Common read book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot. Light refreshments (cookies, tea, coffee, and juice) will be provided and participants are welcome to bring their own lunches. Everyone is invited to attend!

CONVENERS

The Book Club is facilitated by Rochelle Smith and the Women's Center staff. To RSVP to attend, please e-mail them directly. Or, if you have suggestions for future books or articles, pass them along to the Women's Center or Rochelle.

SYNOPSIS

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance.

Soon to be made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, this New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. It’s a story inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we’re made of.

Copies are available for purchase at the University of Idaho Bookstore and for check-out from the U of I main library, and through VALNet.