Culture Dish
Rebecca Skloot's blog on science, writing, and life.
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010
First Henrietta Lacks Foundation Grants Awarded
Today, the Henrietta Lacks Foundation awarded its first ever grants thanks to donations from Rebecca Skloot, and many readers. The first awards cover full tuition and books for five descendants of Henrietta Lacks starting fall semester 2010, as well as an emergency grant for one of Henrietta Lacks’s sons. More information about the inaugural Henrietta Lacks Foundation grants coming soon. For more information on the foundation, or to make a donation, click here.
Friday, August 6th, 2010
Historic Marker to be Placed on Henrietta Lacks’s Home
Tomorrow, the town of Turner Station just outside of Baltimore will place a historic marker at 713 New Pittsburgh Ave, the home where Henrietta Lacks lived the final years of her life. The ceremony is open to the public. Click here for more information.
Saturday, July 24th, 2010
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Chosen as Boston Globe and TED Book Club Picks
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is being read by book clubs around the world, including several associated with organizations (like TED) and publications, including the Boston, which today called the book, “Exhaustively reported and absorbingly written.”
In other news, The Hastings Center, a bioethics institute, just gave The Immortal Life a rave review as well.
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
Pardon Our Dust While We Move
As many of you know, I moved my blog Culture Dish yesterday from ScienceBlogs, where it’s been the past few years. As Carl Zimmer pointed out in his post about PepsiGate and the many bloggers who relocated, moving a blog is no small undertaking. Fortunately, I have a rockstar web designer who created this blog here yesterday and transferred my old Culture Dish archives to this site. But we still have quite a bit of work to do, so pardon our dust. The photos didn’t transfer from the old blog, and some of the formatting of the old posts and comments are wonky from the transition, as is some of the layout of the blog page. And comment moderation is on because … well … I can’t figure out how to turn it off. We’ll be fixing all of that and adding new features in coming days, but I wanted to throw this post up to welcome folks to the new Culture Dish, which may or may not be the permanent Culture Dish. I haven’t decided yet.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to whether I want to blog independently here, or as part of any number of wonderful media blogs out there. Many people have asked whether I’m considering starting my own blogging cooperative: I’m not. For now, I’ll be blogging here, and will post updates on the future when I have them. And perhaps most importantly, as I figure out where I want Culture Dish’s virtual home to be, I will also be moving my actual home. This blog move happened to come up just days before I move from Memphis to Chicago (Moving: Boo! Chicago: Yay!). So things may move a bit slowly as we get things moved both physically and virtually. But the basics are ready: You can subscribe to Culture Dish’s RSS feed either by clicking here, or scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking “Blog RSS.” You can also post comments. And I hope you do.
Update: I’ve turned off the comments feature until I can figure out how to address the flood of spambot comments that get posted here.
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Named as one of Ten “Best Books of the Year … So Far” by Amazon
Amazon.com calls The Immortal Life one of the “must-reads of the year,” naming it one of the top ten “Best Books of the Year” to date. About the book, it said:
“For a decade, Rebecca Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of Henrietta’s story, fashioning in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a rich and haunting tale that redefines what it means to have a medical history.”
For more information, and the full list, click here.
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
Culture Dish Doesn’t Live at ScienceBlogs Anymore
As I said yesterday on Twitter, a big conflict of interest and transparency problem has arisen on ScienceBlogs. Like several other bloggers at ScienceBlogs, I’m now on a hiatus, however like like David Dobb’s, Blake Stacy’s, and others, my hiatus from ScienceBlogs will be permanent. I’ve been contemplating moving my blog from ScienceBlogs to my own site for a while for several reasons, but PepsiGate has sealed the deal for me. Several of my ScienceBlogs colleagues summed up the situation well, including PZ Myers, GrrlScientist, and Brian over at Laelaps. For a full recap of the issue and other ScienceBloggers’ responses, see this post from today’s Guardian. For a clear explanation of the ethical problems that make it so I will no longer be affiliated with Science Blogs, see this from the Knight Journalism Tracker: “ScienceBlogs Trashes its Bloggers’ Credibility.” I’m now looking for a permanent new home for my blog. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter and Facebook and via this blog which has been moved to my personal website.
UPDATE: The Guardian has just posted this letter sent to all ScienceBlogs bloggers today by Adam Bly, head of Seed Media Group and ScienceBlogs.
Update 2: See the Knight Journalism Tracker’s response to Adam Bly’s email linked above.
Update 3: ScienceBloggers have just received a note from Adam Bly saying that in response to all of this, ScienceBlogs has begun making changes to the Pepsi blog, including adding a statement about conflict of interest and funding, adding a banner labeling it as “Advertorial.”
Friday, July 2nd, 2010
Detailed Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks FAQ Page Now Online
Thursday, July 1st, 2010
NPR Names The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks as one of the Top Five Best of the Bestsellers
NPR has just named The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks as one of the top five Best of the Bestsellers (the only nonfiction book in the top five), saying:
The explosive ingredients in this nonfiction book — a scientific thriller, an untold family story, an exploration of race and class — add up to riveting social commentary. Released in February, the book (which is slated to be an Oprah-produced HBO film) remains one of 2010’s most-talked-about titles. Skloot’s dramatic narrative follows three tracks. The first traces the life of Henrietta Lacks, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves, who died in 1951 from aggressive cervical cancer, leaving behind a husband and five children. Skloot parallels that with the story of the cells (codename: HeLa) drawn from Lacks’ tumor, which became the world’s first “immortal” human cells cultivated in a laboratory. The writer’s third narrative thread weaves in her own relationship with Lacks’ children in the years after they find out about the highly lucrative medical uses of their mother’s cells (which were taken without her permission). In a final act of authorial grace, Skloot is donating a portion of the book’s proceeds to the nonprofit foundation she set up to provide scholarships and medical coverage to Lacks’ descendants. (Full story online here)
Thursday, July 1st, 2010
First Experiment to Attempt Prevention of Homosexuality in Womb? Really?
A press release landed in my inbox today with this headline, which raised my eyebrows (as it was obviously intended to do): “First Experiment to Attempt Prevention of Homosexuality in Womb.“ It starts with this quote from Alice Dreger, a Northwestern University bioethicist: “This is the first we know in the history of medicine that clinicians are actively trying to prevent homosexuality.” The release was announcing the publication of a piece at the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum titled, “Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb? — it was written by the same authors that started quite a stir recently over one researchers use of vibrators in follow up exams with young girls to test whether their clitorises worked after he’d surgically altered them.
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
Rebecca Skloot Discusses The Immortal Life on BBC World Service
Now online: Rebecca Skloot discusses The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and the ethics of tissue research on BBC’s Health Check. Listen to the interview here.
