90 Quotes by Rebecca Skloot

The fundamental problem here isn’t the money; it’s the notion that the people these tissues come from don’t matter.

Lillian converted to Puerto Rican,” Gladys said, holding the letter to her chest. I looked at Gary, who sat beside her. “Lillian’s skin was real light, even lighter than mom’s,” Gary explained. “She married a Puerto Rican somewhere in New York. Since she could pass, she disowned her blackness – converted to Puerto Rican because she didn’t want to be black no more.

HeLa was a workhorse: it was hardy, it was inexpensive, and it was everywhere. And.

But today when people talk about the history of Hopkins’s relationship with the black community, the story many of them hold up as the worst offense is that of Henrietta Lacks – a black woman whose body, they say, was exploited by white scientists.

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph. – ELIE WIESEL from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code.

People sometimes spend thousands of dollars treating fish they won at the fair or bought for less than $5. Because they love them.

A casual observer can testify only to the moment. And what one sees will always be colored by what one longs to see.

Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus – and at the very same time – that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.

In recent years, using tissue samples from themselves, their families, and their patients, scientists had grown cells of all kinds – prostate cancer, appendix, foreskin, even bits of human cornea – often with surprising ease. Researchers were using that growing library of cells to make historic discoveries: that cigarettes caused lung cancer; how X-rays and certain chemicals.