Troubling with 'the ethics of the thing' in Culturing Life:How Cells Became Technologies and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

摘要

Many of us now know HeLa to be an 'immortal' cell line produced from the cervical cancer cells of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who died in Baltimore in 1951. For decades, stories about HeLa - and about Henrietta Lacks - have found audiences in American culture: Michael Rogers' 1976 Rolling Stone essay connected the cells and the woman; Michael Gold's 1986 book, A Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman s Immortal Legacy and the Scandal it Caused, chronicled the HeLa contamination scare of the 1960s; and The Way of All Flesh, a 1997 BBC documentary, attempted to capture the impact of HeLa on Henrietta Lacks' children (Curtis, 1997).