The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot

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.

“He showed up at that meeting with no background or anything else in cell culture and proceeded to drop a turd in the punch bowl.”