The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The other day I was scrolling through Facebook and I came across the trailer for "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." I had heard of this story a while ago, but had never paid a lot of attention to it. The story was first written into a book, and now it is being made into an HBO movie starring Oprah Winfrey. I'm sure many people have heard of the story before--Henrietta Lacks, a black woman who died from cervical cancer in the 1950s, had her cancerous cells become the first immortal human cell line. This cell line contributed to many important scientific discoveries. The story is strewn with racist and other unethical practices that affect her cancer treatment and the ethics of using her cancerous cells.

I think it's worth looking into, for myself at least. It touches on a variety of things we have learned about in this class, especially connecting to the experiments abroad ethnography we read a couple of weeks ago. It's important that there is a comprehensive book telling a story about this, and that they are now releasing a movie, too. It's a topic that is often looked over (I was never introduced to this idea of such a blatant unethical use bodies for science until I entered college). I hope it will make people question the ethics of some scientific research, aware that these practices are still around now.

This is the link the the trailer:

http://www.livescience.com/58290-the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks-official-trailer-hbo-2017.html