Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks is buried in an unmarked grave. Her family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. The story of the Lacks family is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of--From publisher description.

From the beginning, Virginians have styled their government a conservative commonwealth, seeking stability amid change and often fashioning change to fit their concept of what Virginia--and America--should be like. In the eighteenth century Golden Age, Virginia was a world of broad acres and country gentlemen. To preserve the world, Virginians led a revolution and helped to found a government that they believed would secure their children's future. In the name of old and tried principles, Virginians in 1861 seceded from the Union to defend a way of life that to them seemed worth fighting for. In the twentieth century, they "paid as they went," convinced that debt meant the end of good government.