Henrietta Lacks

Tiki Barber.

And Henrietta Lacks.

Now, we should all know about Henrietta Lacks.

Did you ever know about Henrietta Lacks?

Did she invent the laxative? No,

she's globally the most famous person connected to Roanoke, where she was born.

So this lady is quite phenomenal.

We have in Bristol a statue of her at Royal Fort House.

A person is smart, but people are stupid.

On the quick topic of cell lines, I would highly recommend the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

It's an amazing book and horrific at the same time.

Did you write that down?

we were thinking about doing this other thing and we were on the way to talk to somebody about that and i was like hey man i was on this old show the invisible man he goes i know you were yeah and then he was like i love that show and i said what if we what if we took that show and played with ralph ellison's invisible man like through the lens of that and then resmaa was like okay go on and then resmaa said well how about this tell me what you

said So then I said, you know, what if we didn't, what if we didn't use the old techniques? What if we actually used the cells that actually transformed them of Henrietta Lacks? And then use that.

And then part of the whole thing is that black people reclaiming those pieces and they shouldn't have been in his body in the first damn place.

So, so, you know, so we wrote a whole, so we've actually written a whole, uh, the whole first season.

And what you guys saw was the pilot and, uh, and the, uh, in the trailer right and so what we're doing now is uh so i've mortgaged my house to do it i didn't know that by the way that was new information yeah and uh but but and then we had my boy uh charles come in who's an emmy award-winning uh editor and he he saved our bacon i'm gonna ask

you something right the henrietta lacks part of it yeah Her story is one of the most disturbing examples of medical exploitation in American history, right? Why was it important to connect that history to this fictional world?

So I believe that fiction and sci-fi and stuff like that offers more room for us than just doing something like a documentary or something like that.

We can do more with it, and it goes into people without us finger waving, right? Before they know it, they're getting something, right, that kind of disturbs them, and that's what we want to do.

And it was that kind of magic and not what I assume is her kind of magic or her wife's kind of magic.

And also, like, just me getting the unsung heroes category and just being like, yes, I remember Henrietta Lacks' name.

Yeah.

Okay.

But culturally, we still are fighting a lot of information, some of it misinformation, some of it real information.

Henrietta Lacks being another big case in the black community where, again, research benefited at the expense of a black woman.

And it wasn't till years or decades later that after she was dead, that her family found out and could even say anything about it.

And that's what we're fighting against, because in some ways it feels like, gee, there's already this anxiety of I'm not white.