

Students also must attend at least one of four panels led by UT’s faculty and top researchers focused on the book’s themes from science and medicine to legality, ethics, and issues of race and socio-economic divides. This year, for the first time, Life of the Mind is part of a zero-credit, pass-fail course that all first-year students must complete between orientation and the first few weeks of class.Īs part of the course, students will read the book, attend a discussion session and the author’s lecture and complete a creative project. Skloot also is now president of the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, which provides grants, funded by proceeds from the book, to the Lacks family as well as others with similar needs, including descendants of research subjects used in the famous Tuskegee Syphilis Studies and others. It has won numerous awards and is being made into a television movie for HBO. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is her debut book which took more than ten years to research and write. Skloot is an award-winning science writer whose work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Discover, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. Family members have received no income from the use of their mother’s cells and remain largely uneducated and living in poverty. The book-which has been named a best book of 2010 by more than sixty critics and sources-chronicles Skloot’s relationship with Lacks’s children and other relatives, who were unaware of the use of their mother’s cells for many years. They have been vital in the development of the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and in vitro fertilization. The cells are still in widespread use today and are one of the most commonly used cells in medical research.

Unlike other cells, those cells continued to grow and reproduce in laboratory conditions and became known as HeLa cells. The nonfiction book tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, a young mother of four whose cancer cells were biopsied during treatment in 1951. This year is also the fiftieth anniversary of African American undergraduates at UT, so the book is significant as it examines the contributions of an African American woman to the foundation of modern medicine.” “This book covers issues including health, poverty, science, racism, and family relationships. “The Life of the Mind program was created to give our incoming freshmen this common experience, but also to foster international and intercultural awareness,” said Sally McMillan, vice provost for academic affairs.

Life of the Mind is a common reading experience that gives first-year students their initial taste of academic life at UT Knoxville. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the university’s 2011 Life of the Mind book selection. Parking will be available in the G10 parking garage, next to the arena.
#The immortal life of henrietta lacks movie 2011 free
in Thompson-Boling Arena, and is free and open to the public.

The book’s author, Rebecca Skloot, will visit the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, campus on Monday, August 15. In fact, it’s a true story, and the subject of the award-winning book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It sounds like the plot of a science fiction movie. Her cells are biopsied and, when they show traits of immortality, are sold for medical research worldwide. KNOXVILLE – A young woman checked into Johns Hopkins Hospital for cancer treatment.
