![]() Rose Byrne as Rebecca Skloot and Oprah Winfrey in “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”īut we soon learn the real reason we’re here, which is seeing how the back-and-forth between Skloot (Rose Byrne) and Deborah reveals why the fuss over Lacks was about more than a curious bit of cervical tissue. Wolfe, backed by the lively tunes of Branford Marsalis, quickly flits through the scientific particulars of Lacks’ contributions in the opening scenes of the movie, providing viewers with just enough background to understand Lacks’ place in history. Lacks’ cells, harvested at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951, provided an infinite supply for scientists to experiment with and test, leading to everything from the polio vaccine to stem cell research.īased on Rebecca Skloot’s best-selling nonfiction book of the same name, Immortal Life is a deep look into the lives of Lacks’ children - specifically her youngest daughter, Deborah (Oprah Winfrey) - and the various traumas they’ve endured as a result of the explosive demand for their mother’s famous cancer cells. Henrietta Lacks is the black Baltimore woman whose cervical cancer cells almost single-handedly transformed the biotech industry because they kept dividing outside of her body, nourished and coaxed by a bit of chicken blood in a petri dish. It’s also about what happens when trust is abused: lawsuits, family squabbles that calcify into bitterness and several lifetimes’ worth of ailments. Real life is the spoiler alert for Fox’s new ‘Shots Fired’.Hidden Figures and the power of pragmatism. ![]() How ‘Queen Sugar’ helps us talk about rape culture.The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame honor Tupac Shakur knew he’d never live to see.‘Little Boxes’ and the issue of nonblack artists depicting black subjects.It’s about what can result when trust is won - millions of people learn about a black woman who otherwise might have simply been known to microbiologists as cells on a slide known as HeLa. At its heart, HBO’s new adaptation of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a story about trust: about earning it, sustaining it, deserving it and trampling it.
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