How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #4
[Gey's] mother worked the garden and fed her family from nothing but the food she raised. As a child, George dug a small coal mine in the hill behind his parents' house. He'd crawl through the damp tunnel each morning with a pick, filling buckets for his family and neighbors so they could keep their houses warm and stoves burning. (38)
The Lackses aren't the only poor people in this story. Skloot tells us that George Gey, the cell culturist who produced the HeLa line, had to overcome a less than privileged beginning. We don't learn much more about Gey's childhood, but we can see from this passage that poverty in white neighborhoods in Pittsburgh looked different than black poverty in segregated Clover, Virginia.
Quote #5
The research subjects didn't ask questions. They were poor and uneducated, and the researchers offered incentives: free physical exams, hot meals, and rides into town on clinic days, plus fifty-dollar burial stipends for their families when the men died. (50)
Skloot describes the circumstances of the Tuskegee syphilis study, which ran until 1972. She highlights exactly the characteristics that made the "study" seriously unethical: taking advantage of a poor minority group, dangling incentives in front of them, withholding information about risk. Not to mention that many people died excruciating and highly preventable deaths while researchers just took notes. The breaking of this story in 1972 led people to question how vulnerable populations might be protected from exploitation like this.
Quote #6
The newspaper article where I'd gotten Henrietta's address quoted a local woman, Courtney Speed, who owned a grocery store and created a foundation dedicated to building a Henrietta Lacks museum. But when I got to the lot where the grocery store was supposed to be, I found a gray, rust-stained mobile home, its broken windows covered with wire. (69)
Guess what? This was the right place, what passes for a grocery store in present-day Turner Station. After the town's boom during WWII, companies bulldozed homes to make room for a giant power plant and other industry, ruining the town as a place to live. 1300 people, mostly black, were left homeless. Turner Station was a shell of a town; stores and cafes—and jobs—had been replaced by drug dealers and housing projects. Another result of the poverty/racism mashup.