By Jeanne Kolker

Excerpts are taken from Jeanne Kolker interview with Rebecca Skloot for the Wisconsin State Journal.

Since the book was published, has anyone else come forward and told you anything you wish you could have included in the book?

Not in terms of the story of the HeLa cells and the progress of it. One of the questions that often comes up is, “Why did HeLa cells grow when no other cells did?” The answer is we don’t exactly know. Continue reading “Wisconsin States Interview with Rebecca Skloot”

Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of HEnrietta LAcks tells the story of the Lacks family and how their mother’s cells changed medical research.  Skloot’s book fills in details about Henrietta’s life and the cervical cancer that provided science with the first cell line, HeLa.

Without her knowledge, Henrietta Lacks’ (HeLa) cells were collected and used for cervical cancer research.  These immortalized cells – reproducing still today – would eventually be used to generate the first-ever human cell line and distributed world-wide for use in millions of experiments benefiting human health from the polio vaccine to gene mapping.

Continue reading “HeLa, by Elizabeth Sefton”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a great resource of Great Lakes information.

Check out a few of these tid-bits:

Water Surface Area: 95,000 square miles (245,759 square km). Largest surface area of freshwater in the world.

Continue reading “The Great Lakes (in a nutshell)”

Donald Scavia is the Graham Family Professor of Sustainability, Professor of Natural Resources and Environment, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Director of the Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute, and Special Counsel to the U-M President for Sustainability.

Continue reading “Climate Change’s Donald Scavia’s Biography”