Saturday, September 10, 2011

Opening Sentence of the Day: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks



There's a photo on my wall of a woman I've never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape.
-- from the author's Prologue to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

This is my Book Club's current book. It is a non-fiction account of the woman who's cancer cells -- which have been growing ever since 1951 when a sample of the tumor was put in a petri dish -- became known as HeLa and have been used in medical research for the last 60 years.