Sublime

Havasupai Tribe sued Arizona State University after scientists took tissue samples the tribe donated for diabetes research and used them without consent to study schizophrenia and inbreeding.

As Joel puts it, “our experiences literally get under our skin” and change how our genes are expressed.

“Pounding in the back of their heads was a gnawing feeling that science and the press had taken advantage of them.”

Late in the era of the syphilis experiment, doctors discovered that rather than bad blood, Henrietta Lacks, a poor Black tobacco farmer and mother of five, had magical cells, so hardy that they were labeled immortal. In 1951, Lacks visited Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore complaining of vaginal bleeding. While she was undergoing treatment for

Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus—and at the very same time—that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.

Together, they form one great symbiotic association, like the ones they study.