the immortal life of henrietta lacks movie

#The immortal life of henrietta lacks movie professional

Nor did they ever explain to her children whose blood they came and sampled, many times over the years, precisely what they were doing and why.

#The immortal life of henrietta lacks movie professional

The doctors did not ask for their impoverished, black female patient’s consent before they took that sample, out of a combination of professional zeal, arrogance, racism and paternalism whose precise proportions we can never know. Henrietta’s cells proved to be the ones, and – by forming the springboard for new treatments for diseases such as TB, flu, herpes, Aids and for the development of chemotherapy – changed the face of medicine for ever. The doctors there took a sample of her malignant tissues as part of their search for a line of cells that were able to survive and reproduce outside the body, and so make possible medical experiments they were not able to perform on living bodies.

Henrietta Lacks was 31 and a mother of five children when she died at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins hospital of cervical cancer in 1951. She plays Deborah, the emotionally and physically unstable daughter of Henrietta Lacks, who suffers the torments of growing up not just motherless, but abused by family members and tortured by the knowledge that her mother was – and still is – being exploited for other peoples’ gain. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Sky Atlantic), an adaptation of the book of the same title by Rebecca Skloot that remained on bestseller lists for six years, she reminds us why. I t is easy to forget, amid everything else she has achieved, that Oprah Winfrey is an Oscar-nominated actor (in 1985, for her role as Sofia in The Color Purple).