… an Sandra, die mich mit Rebecca Skloots The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks überrascht hat. Über das Buch bin ich durch einen Artikel in der NYT aufmerksam geworden, der über die TV-Verfilmung berichtete; den Artikel las ich gar nicht erst, sondern klickte nach einem Absatz stattdessen auf die Buchrezension:

„The woman who provides this book its title, Henrietta Lacks, was a poor and largely illiterate Virginia tobacco farmer, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves. Born in 1920, she died from an aggressive cervical cancer at 31, leaving behind five children. […]

To scientists, however, Henrietta Lacks almost immediately became known simply as HeLa (pronounced hee-lah), from the first two letters of her first and last names. Cells from Mrs. Lacks’s cancerous cervix, taken without her knowledge, were the first to grow in culture, becoming “immortal” and changing the face of modern medicine. […]

Bought and sold and shipped around the world for decades, HeLa cells are famous to science students everywhere. But little has been known, until now, about the unwitting donor of these cells. Mrs. Lacks’s own family did not know that her cells had become famous (and that people had grown wealthy from marketing them) until more than two decades after her death, after scientists had begun to take blood from her surviving family members, without their informed consent, in order to better study HeLa.“

Das klang nach einem Buch, das ich dringend lesen wollen würde. Vielen Dank für das Geschenk und die Widmung, ich habe mich sehr gefreut.