October Book Club Meeting

October Book Club Meeting

October Book Club Meeting

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Host: Dickie

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Book: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

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Response of the Book Club Members: Everyone agreed that this book read like science fiction. But this true story of the life and death of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman from Clover, VA and what happened to her cells at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center after she succumbed to ovarian cancer. The strangest thing for the Piedmont Readers to contemplate was how her cells known in the medical world as HeLa cells have never died and have contributed to advances in medical treatment for polio, tuberculosis, etc.

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Book discussion centered around slavery, racism, civil rights, the polio scare in the 1950's, the TB scare in the 1940's and 1950's, the AIDS scare of the 1980's and of course where we stand today in addressing these issues. Some members enjoyed both the scientific and human interest aspects of this non-fiction book while others preferred just the human interest aspects of this strange story.

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Thank you Dickie for giving us an extraordinary book to read.
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I personally found the following quote from the afterword of this book interesting: "When I tell people the story of Henrietta Lacks and her cells, the first question is usually Wasn't it illegal for doctors to take Henrietta's cell without her knowledge: Don't doctors have to tell you when they use your cells in research? The answer is no--not in 1951, and not in 2009, when this book went to press."