This weekend, The Immortal Life on Henrietta Lacks premieres on HBO, adapted from Rebecca Skloot’s critically acclaimed book, and starring none other than Oprah Winfrey. The story that book tells—how one woman’s cancerous cells, obtained without permission during a 1951 biopsy, went on to become the HeLa cell line, which introduced the idea of the “immortalized” cell (cells that, if properly maintained, can and will reproduce themselves indefinitely—even outside of the human body), and changed biomedical research forever. Lacks’s story is only part of a larger narrative about the history of biobanking—when, under pressure from Cold War-era atomic survivalism, scientists began stockpiling and freezing blood samples from global indigenous communities—samples believed to hold crucial keys about everything from microbes to genetic evolution—all the while facilitating the birth of the genomic age. Joanna Radin’s Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood unpacks that complex history, reframing the biobank experiments as building blocks for today’s biomedicine, and locating them in their unique technical and social milieu, while offering up an endlessly fascinating digestion of a biological timeline set toward immortality. From a review of the book in Nature: sharply original history focuses on serum collected from indigenous communities and frozen during the cold war. Some samples have . . .
The Diversity Bargain at PopMatters
Below follows an excerpt from “On Race and Meritocracy in Academia” at PopMatters, a review of Natasha K. Warikoo’s The Diversity Bargain and other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities. *** Diversity is perceived as something that’s intended to benefit everyone, including white students. It isn’t defended as being a matter of social justice, but rather as the best way to equip young Americans to succeed in today’s world. White Americans (and other students with privilege) see diversity and affirmative action as something which is intended to benefit them, and so long as it appears to be doing that, they’re okay with it. But when diversity places barriers in their way—when they experience rejection in admissions or job applications or anything else which they can find reason to blame on affirmative action—they’re quick to criticize it, or to blame it for their own shortcomings. There’s a related imperative for minority or marginalized groups of students to appear to be living up to their ‘side’ of the ‘bargain’, i.e., giving the privileged groups exposure to their marginalized peers, and contributing to the privileged students’ education on diversity. When marginalized students form identity-based student groups, or hold events to which white students . . .
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