Second-generation ice cream makers opening store near Patterson Park – BBJ
Tumbling dice: Baltimore area casinos still struggle against MGM onslaught – Baltimore Brew
City grads set scholarship record – WYPR
Ravens Set Dates For Open Practices, Including Annapolis Return – WBAL
Finding Turner Station: The town that gave us Henrietta Lacks’ immortal life – City Paper
Something Rotten brings laughter and music to Baltimore – ABC2
After a rocky start, Pugh assembles a “workgroup” on homelessness – Baltimore Brew
Md. Communities Face Controversial Question Of Sanctuary Status – CBS Baltimore
Dumped by Fox News but OK for Baltimore: Bill O’Reilly show still on – City Paper
Henrietta Lacks Mural Takes Shape – Baltimore Magazine
Two Maryland senators and four representatives, all Democrats, have introduced a resolution in Congress to honor Henrietta Lacks, who for more than half a century went unrecognized for her posthumous contributions to medical research.
“You’re famous. Just nobody knows it,” a woman says to her long-deceased mother in the much-anticipated HBO movie based on events that took place in Baltimore.
Henrietta Lacks, the Baltimore woman whose cancer cells have contributed to decades’ worth of groundbreaking research after her death, has been memorialized in a portrait that will be hung in City Hall.
Oprah Winfrey is bringing The Immortal of Life of Henrietta Lacks, the true story of a Johns Hopkins patient, to HBO, and Oprah sightings have been reported around Baltimore.
Johns Hopkins has attempted to make amends to the family of Henrietta Lacks (the woman who died of cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951, and whose remarkably “immortal” cells have been used for research since then) — they’ve endowed a lectureship, created a scholarship fund at an East Baltimore school, and donated money to local non-profits in her name. And now, finally, they’re giving her family a say in how her genetic material is used.
I still remember the book all the incoming freshmen had to read at my college (it was Octavia Butler’s Kindred — in retrospect, a sign that my college was going to be pretty cool). The idea for these programs is to give students a common intellectual touchstone to chat about in classes, or while waiting in line at the cafeteria. But freshman reading can also be a litmus test for how a school sees itself. Do they prefer the hard-hitting to the feel-good? Are they nervous about assigning students anything that looks too much like work? Our analysis of local universities’ summer reading picks — and what they say about the universities themselves — is below:
Last year’s surprise non-fiction bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, put Johns Hopkins in a tricky position. In Rebecca Skloot’s account of the woman whose continually reproducing cervical cancer cells have been the foundation of medical breakthroughs for decades since her death in the 1950s, the hospital comes off as cold — callous, even. “Neither Henrietta Lacks nor her family were taken seriously when a sample of her cervical cancer cells was taken and immortalized – without their knowledge – as the HeLa cell line,” writes one blogger. “Rebecca Skloot’s documentation of the insensitivity that was shown toward the Lacks family at Johns Hopkins, unwittingly or not, makes you plain angry.”
As the university tries to build a better reputation with the city, this is exactly not the image they want to be projecting. To that end, the school has endowed a Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture, intended to honor Lacks and to “describe the reach and complexity, both biomedically and ethically, of the story of Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells as well as to provide some insight into the past, present, and future of the conduct of clinical research.”
In another public gesture, the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute just instituted the Henrietta Lacks Memorial Award, “created to recognize and support Baltimore community organizations that are collaborating with The Johns Hopkins University to improve the health and well-being of Baltimore City and its residents.” This year’s $15,000 grant went to Newborn Holistic Ministries, which runs a program for homeless women, arts classes for kids, as well as other services to meet residents’ “material, social, and spiritual needs.”
It’s certainly a positive effort — but is it enough to repair decades of antagonism between the university and the East Baltimore communities it uneasily coexists with?
