April 6, 2010 After being welcomed by the American media as literary royalty—featured three times in one week by The New York Times and appearing on that high throne of media success, The Daily Show, just for starters—Rebecca Skloot is now getting attention overseas as well. On Sunday, Robin McKie, science editor for The Guardian, discussed The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks—and used the opportunity to comment on this country’s sorry history of health care for minorities: “Certainly, for a country that is only now facing up to the consequences and implications of universal health insurance, the story of Henrietta Lacks is a telling one,” McKie notes. “The treatment of Henrietta and her children reveals an unpleasant aspect of medicine in the US, where African Americans were routinely used—until relatively recently—as the subjects of highly unpleasant sets of experiments.” Click here to read the full story.
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