Beloit Book BRAG in Baltimore

Read the FYI Common Book along with the First Year
Students and share their experience.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
By Rebecca Skloot

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor
Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet
her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important
tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are
still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored”
ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with
freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover,
Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East
Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with
the legacy of her cells.

Let’s get together to discuss this book and what it represents to us and to our world.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012
7:30 p.m.

Home of Cindy Osborne
1519 Bolton Street
Baltimore MD 21217

RSVP to Jenny Burdick
410.467.5462
Jennifer.burdick@verizon.net