Ready To Join The Discussion? Then come to the Spalding Public Library’s Book Club meeting on Monday, October 6th at 5:00 p.m. in the library’s meeting room. The book club will be discussing September’s selected book entitled, “The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks” written by author Rebecca Skloot. This remarkable story of how the cervical cells of the late Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman, enabled further discoveries from the polio vaccine to in vitro fertilization is extraordinary in itself; the added portrayal of Lacks’s full life makes the story come alive with her humanity and the apparent relationship between race, science, and exploitation. Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning science writer, with a B.S. in biological sciences and an MFA in creative writing. She first heard about Henrietta Lacks and HeLa in a community college biology class when she was 16. As she continued her studies she became fixated on the idea of telling Henrietta’s. She spent over a decade researching and writing this story, which has been translated into over 25 languages and is now being made into an HBO movie.
Please join us as we discuss this richly textured story of the hidden costs of scientific progress.
