Skloot continued to investigate the background of the HeLa cells and eventually, drawing on her experience as a science writer, decided that she would write about it. As the other students filed out the room, I sat thinking, That’s it? That’s all we get? There has to be more to the story” (4).
Then, matter-of-factly, almost as an afterthought, he said, ‘She was a black woman.’ He erased her name in one fast swipe and blew the chalk from his hands. “ ‘HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened in medicine in the last hundred years,’ Defler said. Rebecca Skloot first learned about and became fascinated with HeLa in a community college biology class. Since Henrietta’s cells were first successfully cultured, they have been distributed to research labs worldwide-producing a multi-million dollar industry. (An immortal cell line is one that has mutated to become capable of undergoing division and surviving indefinitely.) The HeLa cell line has been one of the most important tools in medicine, helping to develop the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, treatment for cancer, and much more. George Gey, a scientist at John Hopkins, and became an immortal cell line – known as the HeLa cell line – used for medical research. The story revolves around Henrietta Lacks, a poor African-American tobacco farmer whose cells were taken from her in 1951-without her knowledge-while she was being treated for cervical cancer in John Hopkins Hospital.
As Skloot herself confesses, she began to write this book simply as a story about a special cell culture and ended up encountering people that “challenged everything I thought I knew about faith, science, journalism, and race” (7). In doing so, she is sketching what may be considered an anti-Gnostic story about science. What if we can’t fully account for “science” apart from the finite and fallible community of practice within which it develops? And what if “scientific issues” include not just epistemological issues about the validity of theories but also social justice issues about how science has related to different communities? Far from discrediting science, Skloot attempts to put flesh and bone on scientific research and practice. Rebecca Skloot’s book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, expresses similar concerns for her readers today. Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Jewish rabbi and philosopher, once addressed a gathering of doctors with the following words: “Religion is medicine in the form of a prayer medicine is prayer in the form of a deed.” Heschel’s description of medicine as prayer was particularly apt since he, in this 1964 speech, was concerned with how medical research and practice continued to face the limitations and temptations of all human communities in spite of considerable technological progress.
0 kommentar(er)
