"It's in the DNA of our country," says Wolfe, "and it plays out in very subtle dynamics." Wolfe, who wrote the screenplay and directed the movie, portraying that racial dimension required understatement. Their races-Deborah is black, Skloot is white-heighten the tension between the two women, as does the racism Deborah encounters as she travels with Skloot to track down her family's history. Winfrey plays Deborah Lacks, Byrne plays Rebecca Skloot in the upcoming HBO movie version of "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." Quantrell D. "She's feeling lied to and thinking about all the times she's been betrayed," says Winfrey, who was also the film's executive producer. She walks away in a burst of anger, the first of many such outbursts during her times with Skloot. "I'm tired of wanting to know and hiding." Minutes later, she is snatching away the envelope containing Henrietta's medical records that she'd just given Skloot. "I wanna learn everything I can about my mama's cells," Winfrey's Deborah tells Skloot. But having been ignored by academics and dissuaded by family-some wanted monetary compensation from the discoveries HeLa enabled, and some worried the pursuit would worsen her fragile mental health-Deborah sometimes trusts Skloot and sometimes is wary of her. As they slowly came to understand the significance of their mother's cells, they questioned why they were excluded from that knowledge-as well as from the profits from the many new medicines HeLa led to.ĭeborah just wants to know her mother, and that yearning brings her to meet with Skloot, who knows that getting the story hinges on access to the Lacks family. Her children knew nothing of their mother's extraordinary role in medicine until 1975. The doctors who'd treated Henrietta at Johns Hopkins Hospital called her cells "HeLa," refusing to attach her full name, ostensibly to protect her and her family's privacy. But in the global distribution of Henrietta's immortal cells and the ensuing discoveries, she was forgotten. Skloot, a young science journalist trying to unearth Henrietta's story, is not only the book's author but also a central part of the story it tells. "Deborah, there isn't a person alive who hasn't benefited from your mother's cells," Skloot, played by Rose Byrne, tells Winfrey's character early in their relationship. They were also the first to be cloned and have led to a vital understanding about how these building blocks of life grow and die. The progress we've made against tuberculosis, many infectious diseases, cancer, infertility and other serious conditions can be traced back to Henrietta's cells. The ability to cultivate Henrietta's cells in petri dishes transformed every inch of the medical research field. Henrietta's did-and that phenomenon changed the world, starting with the 1952 creation of a polio vaccine. For years, doctors removed tissue from patients to see if their cells possessed that magic property. Scientists had long been searching for human cells that would continue replicating outside a body, which would allow them to experiment directly on human cells, a crucial step for medical progress. First comes the story of Henrietta, a black woman from Baltimore who died of cervical cancer in 1951 at age 31. The movie, which premieres April 22, tells an abbreviated version of the same narrative. Rebecca Skloot wove three inextricably linked threads into her nonfiction page-turner, which has sold more than 2.5 million copies since it was published in 2010. And to get even that close, she had to brave confrontations with medical authorities, racism, her family history and her own troubled psychology. For a daughter desperate to know more about her long-deceased mother, holding frozen cells derived from a cancer-ridden cervix is "as close as she would ever come," explains Winfrey. But in Immortal, that tissue, that bit of a woman's body, is more than a research specimen.
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