As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family - past and present - is inextricably connected to the history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.
And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent.
#THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS MOVIE FREE FULL#
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 quarters for enslaved people, faith healings, and voodoo - to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping and have been bought and sold by the billions. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons-as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her enslaved ancestors, yet her cells-taken without her knowledge-became one of the most important tools in medicine. A film set behind the scenes of a home shopping channel and starring Winfrey, Meryl Streep and Sandra Bullock never made it into production and a Broadway revival of the play “Night, Mother” which Winfrey was to star in with multiple Tony winning actress Audra McDonald never got off the ground either, with Winfrey saying she found the play too depressing to do eight shows a week.Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Winfrey also has had some trouble seeing her proposed acting projects come to fruition. SEE 2017 Emmy nominations list: All the nominees Ironically her place that time was probably taken by her personal friend and frequent talk show guest Julia Roberts (“August: Osage County”) who was nominated in supporting for a clearly leading role in one of the recent cases of category fraud which seem to plague that particular Oscar category. Winfrey was in a similar situation in 2013 when she received a number of precursor nominations for her supporting turn in the film “The Butler” but then failed to make the final five on Oscar nomination day. Emmys voters don’t usually feel the need to honor shows that have been given the ax by their networks. Although Huffman is an Emmy vet and was nominated for the first two seasons of “American Crime,” her role was greatly reduced in size this season and the show itself was cancelled. Huffman’s beating out Winfrey for a nomination is the surprise here. The remaining two slots went to Carrie Coon of “Fargo” (which wasn’t a big surprise given the show’s popularity with Emmy voters and the large number of acting nominations the show has received over the years) and Felicity Huffman‘s third nom for “American Crime.” Granted Winfrey faced extremely tough competition what with the Oscar winners from “Feud” ( Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon) and “Big Little Lies” ( Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon) filling out the category.
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