![]() Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia - a land of wooden quarters for enslaved people, faith healings, and voodoo - to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping and have been bought and sold by the billions. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons-as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her enslaved ancestors, yet her cells-taken without her knowledge-became one of the most important tools in medicine. Screenplay: Peter Landesman, Alexander Woo, George C.Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Vance, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Leslie Uggams Cathey, Ruben Santiago-Hudson and Leslie Uggams) pops up to unconvincingly over-emote or merely to lend their charismatic presence to a worthy subject that deserves a much stronger execution.Ĭast: Oprah Winfrey, Rose Byrne, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Reg E. Most everyone else (and there are incredible talents here like Reg E. And second, in the film’s climactic stretch, when Deborah rails against the stormy heavens like Queen Lear, a wrenching section that feels as if it was ghost-helmed by Lee Daniels. Vance as Sir Lord Keenan Coefield, a con man, as slick and snake-charming as his bombastic name, out to milk the Lacks family and their bad fortune for all it’s worth. First, in a brief appearance by Courtney B. Wolfe, a terrific theater artist, seems to have instructed Winfrey, Byrne and the rest of the cast to play to some nonexistent rafters. ![]() With the exception of Renée Elise Goldsberry - who gives a half-saintly, half-corporeal dignity to Henrietta herself in a few brief flashback scenes - director and co-writer George C. The intentions are good, but the problems are legion, from a score by Branford Marsalis that vacillates wildly between inventive jazziness and sugary treacle to flat, flailing cinematography by, of all people, Sofian El Fani, whose work here in no way approaches the level of his evocative efforts on the Cannes prize-winning features Blue Is the Warmest Color and Timbuktu. The chief issue, however, is the misguided choice to make Deborah and Rebecca’s relationship (the story’s heart and soul) predominantly farcical. And now that best-seller comes to HBO in a lukewarm 90-minute adaptation starring Oprah Winfrey as Henrietta’s daughter Deborah and Rose Byrne as Skloot. White journalist Rebecca Skloot aimed to remedy this situation with her 2010 book, a decade in the making, titled The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. ![]() But while these “immortal” organisms helped give rise to pharmaceuticals that could combat diseases like cancer and AIDS, the woman from whom they came was never given her due. This one set of cells, nicknamed HeLa, proved to be extremely resilient in laboratory settings, and it revolutionized medical research. There’s a great story to be told about Henrietta Lacks, the African-American tobacco farmer who, in 1951, had a tissue sample removed, without her knowledge or consent, from the malignant tumor on her cervix.
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