“Like the Bible said,' Gary whispered, 'man brought nothing into this world and he'll carry nothing out. Sometimes we care about stuff too much. We worry when there's nothing to worry about.”
―
Rebecca Skloot,
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“She's the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother is so important to science, why can't we get health insurance?” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“But I tell you one thing, I don't want to be immortal if it mean living forever, cause then everybody else just die and get old in front of you while you stay the same, and that's just sad.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“When he asked if she was okay, her eyes welled with tears and she said, “Like I’m always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can’t do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“Some things you got to release. Gary said. The more you hold them in, the worse you get. When you release them, they got to go somewhere else. The Bible says He can carry all that burden.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph. —ELIE WIESEL from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus—and at the very same time—that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“I keep with me all I know about you deep in my soul, because I am part of you, and you are me.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“For me, it's writing a book and telling people about this story.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“Like I'm always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can't do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors?” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“I later learned that while Elsie was at Crownsville, scientists often conducted research on patients there without consent, including one study titled "Pneumoencephalographic and skull X-ray studies in 100 epileptics." Pneumoencephalography was a technique developed in 1919 for taking images of the brain, which floats in a sea of liquid. That fluid protects the brain from damage, but makes it very difficult to X-ray, since images taken through fluid are cloudy. Pneumoencephalography involved drilling holes into the skulls of research subjects, draining the fluid surrounding their brains, and pumping air or helium into the skull in place of the fluid to allow crisp X-rays of the brain through the skull. the side effects--crippling headaches, dizziness, seizures, vomiting--lasted until the body naturally refilled the skull with spinal fluid, which usually took two to three months. Because pneumoencephalography could cause permanent brain damage and paralysis, it was abandoned in the 1970s. "There is no evidence that the scientists who did research on patients at Crownsville got consent from either the patients of their parents. Bases on the number of patients listed in the pneumoencephalography studyand the years it was conducted, Lurz told me later, it most likely involved every epileptic child in the hospital including Elsie. The same is likely true of at lest on other study called "The Use of Deep Temporal Leads in the Study of Psychomotor Epilepsy," which involved inserting metal probes into patients' brains.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“But today when people talk about the history of Hopkins’s relationship with the black community, the story many of them hold up as the worst offense is that of Henrietta Lacks—a black woman whose body, they say, was exploited by white scientists.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“Henrietta’s cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it,” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“Nelson-Rees had since been hired by the National Cancer Institute to help stop the contamination problem. He would become known as a vigilante who published “HeLa Hit Lists” in Science, listing any contaminated lines he found, along with the names of researchers who’d given him the cells. He didn’t warn researchers when he found that their cells had been contaminated with HeLa; he just published their names, the equivalent of having a scarlet H pasted on your lab door.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; and that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, culture, and conversations to transform the possibilities for the last chapters of all of our lives.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015
“She's the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother is so important to science, why can't we get health insurance?” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“But I tell you one thing, I don't want to be immortal if it mean living forever, cause then everybody else just die and get old in front of you while you stay the same, and that's just sad.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“When he asked if she was okay, her eyes welled with tears and she said, “Like I’m always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can’t do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“Some things you got to release. Gary said. The more you hold them in, the worse you get. When you release them, they got to go somewhere else. The Bible says He can carry all that burden.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph. —ELIE WIESEL from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus—and at the very same time—that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“I keep with me all I know about you deep in my soul, because I am part of you, and you are me.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“For me, it's writing a book and telling people about this story.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“Like I'm always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can't do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors?” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“I later learned that while Elsie was at Crownsville, scientists often conducted research on patients there without consent, including one study titled "Pneumoencephalographic and skull X-ray studies in 100 epileptics." Pneumoencephalography was a technique developed in 1919 for taking images of the brain, which floats in a sea of liquid. That fluid protects the brain from damage, but makes it very difficult to X-ray, since images taken through fluid are cloudy. Pneumoencephalography involved drilling holes into the skulls of research subjects, draining the fluid surrounding their brains, and pumping air or helium into the skull in place of the fluid to allow crisp X-rays of the brain through the skull. the side effects--crippling headaches, dizziness, seizures, vomiting--lasted until the body naturally refilled the skull with spinal fluid, which usually took two to three months. Because pneumoencephalography could cause permanent brain damage and paralysis, it was abandoned in the 1970s. "There is no evidence that the scientists who did research on patients at Crownsville got consent from either the patients of their parents. Bases on the number of patients listed in the pneumoencephalography studyand the years it was conducted, Lurz told me later, it most likely involved every epileptic child in the hospital including Elsie. The same is likely true of at lest on other study called "The Use of Deep Temporal Leads in the Study of Psychomotor Epilepsy," which involved inserting metal probes into patients' brains.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“But today when people talk about the history of Hopkins’s relationship with the black community, the story many of them hold up as the worst offense is that of Henrietta Lacks—a black woman whose body, they say, was exploited by white scientists.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“Henrietta’s cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it,” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“Nelson-Rees had since been hired by the National Cancer Institute to help stop the contamination problem. He would become known as a vigilante who published “HeLa Hit Lists” in Science, listing any contaminated lines he found, along with the names of researchers who’d given him the cells. He didn’t warn researchers when he found that their cells had been contaminated with HeLa; he just published their names, the equivalent of having a scarlet H pasted on your lab door.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; and that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, culture, and conversations to transform the possibilities for the last chapters of all of our lives.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015
