Think you’ve got your head wrapped around The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks? Put your knowledge to
the test. Good luck — the Stickman is counting on you!
Q. Her once-beautiful eyes bulge from her head, slightly bruised and almost swollen shut. She stares somewhere just below the camera, crying, her face misshapen and barely recognizable [...]. Who is Skloot describing here?
Henrietta Lacks
Elsie Lacks
Mary Kubicek
Bobbette Lacks
Q. To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping, slave owners told tales of gruesome research done on black bodies, then covered themselves in white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect black people with disease or steal them for research [...]. Why does Skloot give us this backstory?
She's explaining a personal experience of the Lacks family.
She wants readers to understand the Lacks' distrust of doctors
She's trying to freak the Lacks family out with this tale.
She wants to understand how the KKK was established.
Q. 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. What is Skloot talking about here?
Lead abatement studies
Southam's cancer cell injections
Studies at Hopkins
The Tuskegee syphilis study
Q. "I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we'd been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman." Who is speaking here?
Margaret Gey
Susan Hsu
Mary Kubicek, Gey's lab technician
Courtney Speed
Q. Fill in the blank: "______ was built in 1889 as a charity hospital for the sick and poor, and it covered more than a dozen acres where a cemetery and insane asylum once sat...."
Johns Hopkins
Walter Reed
The Tuskegee Institute
Morehouse Hospital