90 Quotes by Rebecca Skloot

But I always have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin about them takin her cells, now we don’t get a dime.

Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge.

The term informed consent first appeared in court documents in 1957, in a civil court ruling on the case of a patient named Martin Salgo. He went under anesthesia for what he thought was a routine procedure and woke up permanently paralyzed from the waist down. The doctor hadn’t told him the procedure carried any risks at all. The.

The sort of thinking at the time was, ‘Well, we’re giving you access to medical care which you wouldn’t otherwise be able to get, so your payment is that we get to use you in research.’

If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?

The Geys were determined to grow the first immortal human cells: a continuously dividing line of cells all descended from one original sample, cells that would constantly replenish themselves and never die.

Sonny had a quintuple bypass in 2003, when he was fifty-six years old – the last thing he remembered before falling unconscious under the anesthesia was a doctor standing over him saying his mother’s cells were one of the most important things that had ever happened to medicine. Sonny woke up more than $125,000 in debt because he didn’t have health insurance to cover the surgery.

In 2012 researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute showed that two hours of exposure to a bright tablet screen at night, like an iPad or a Kindle, reduced melatonin levels by 22 percent.

You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. These days are spent in institutions – nursing homes and intensive-care units – where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life.