Henrietta Lacks Reading Review

Chapter 21-25

Quotes:

“You know what is a myth… Everybody always saying Henrietta Lacks donated those cells. They took and didn’t ask”-Bobbette

"This story just got to be told! Praise the Lord, people got to know about Henrietta!"

"Nobody round here never understood how she dead and that thing still livin'. That's where the mystery's at"

"When I saw [Henrietta's] toenails … I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she's a real person. I started imagining her sitting in the bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we'd been working with all this time and sending all over the world”

"Since at least the 1800s, black oral history has been filled with tales of 'night doctors' who kidnapped black people for research. And there were disturbing truths behind those stories"

“Like the Bible said,' Gary whispered, 'man brought nothing into this world and he'll carry nothing out. Sometimes we care about stuff too much. We worry when there's nothing to worry about.” 

“She's the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother is so important to science, why can't we get health insurance?” “I later learned that while Elsie was at Crownsville, scientists often conducted research on patients there without consent, including one study titled "Pneumoencephalographic and skull X-ray studies in 100 epileptics." Pneumoencephalography was a technique developed in 1919 for taking images of the brain, which floats in a sea of liquid. That fluid protects the brain from damage, but makes it very difficult to X-ray, since images taken through fluid are cloudy. Pneumoencephalography involved drilling holes into the skulls of research subjects, draining the fluid surrounding their brains, and pumping air or helium into the skull in place of the fluid to allow crisp X-rays of the brain through the skull. the side effects--crippling headaches, dizziness, seizures, vomiting--lasted until the body naturally refilled the skull with spinal fluid, which usually took two to three months. Because pneumoencephalography could cause permanent brain damage and paralysis, it was abandoned in the 1970s. 

“angry—angry that Henrietta’s cells were being sold for twenty-five dollars a vial, and angry that articles” 

“Baltimore, looking at a genetics textbook. Her” 

“Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus—and at the very same time—that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.”