The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks Full Chapter Brief

This is a story about HeLa, the immortal cells, and Henrietta Lacks, who was the owner of these cells. This story recounts the history of progress in human medicine, the research and development of cancer vaccines, cloning technology and gene mapping. It raises the discussion on medical ethics, the ownership of body tissues, the right to in-formed consent, and cultural beliefs. How did HeLa cells come into being? Why are these cells immortal? What’s the significance of the birth of HeLa? The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks will tell you the details of this story.

Overview | Chapter 1

Hi, welcome to Bookey. Today we will unlock the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Immortality is a topic that conjures up images of beauty and imagination, which has been talked about since ancient times. For example, it’s said in the Bible, “I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” Over the past thousand years, instances of people who become immortal from believing in religion have never been found, but this hasn’t affected people’s pursuit of immortality.

Therefore, in modern society, many people hope to achieve immortality by turning to advanced science and technology. In 1967, scientists were commissioned to freeze the body of an American physicist, James Bedford, using cryogenic technology. In July 2015, the body of Zhan Wenlian, a common voluntary worker in Shandong, China, underwent the same treatment. By doing these, scientists hope to continue studying the resurrection of the human body, so that when the technology become available in the near future, they could possibly thaw and resurrect these bodies.

Is the belief in immortality a scientific fantasy, or a reality? The book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks will tell you the answer to this question. This book not only tells the story of the immortal cells, HeLa, and the owner Henrietta Lacks, but also shows the history of human medical progress. It presents people’s discussions on medical ethics, the ownership of bodily tissues, and the right to informed consent, over the last century.

The author of the book is Rebecca Skloot, a well-known scientific writer in the United States. She has been curious about Henrietta and her cells since she was 16 years old, and began studying and investigating the story of HeLa many years later. After 10 years of exploration, the author not only discovered the secret of HeLa’s immortality and the story behind the cells, but also learned about the moral and ethical challenges that scientists faced when using HeLa cells in their research. The author finally finished this 320,000-word documentary work of literature and published it. She wanted to help people understand “the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks”, and hoped to draw their attention to the value of life, individual dignity, and medical ethics.

Next, I will tell you the story of HeLa in three parts:

Part One: The Previous and Present Life of HeLa

Part Two: HeLa’s Great Contributions

Part Three: Problems Caused by HeLa

The 4-hour Workweek

The 4-hour Workweek Full Chapter Brief

Are you constantly immersed in your work, fantasizing about your eventual retirement? It’s time to reconsider this “deferred-life plan”. The best outcome of this plan is that you turn into a bald fat man sitting in a red BMW. This book is giving you a different option. By adopting the “mini retirements” approach of the new rich, you will be able to start exploring your dream job and life.

Overview | Chapter 1

Hi, welcome to Bookey. Today we will unlock the book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. This book will challenge your view of how you live your life, especially when it comes to your retirement plan. Please join us on this journey towards a new way of work and life.

Think about this question first: Do you look forward to living the good life after retirement? What is it like? Maybe you have planned on playing games all day, are keen to pack your bag and travel the world, or maybe write a memoir of your own. No matter what your answer is, you should think again about this kind of deferred-life plan, that is, the idea of spending most of your prime years working and saving money, then spending the money during your retirement.

This type of thinking is very common. But this book believes that the reality of your retirement life may not be as good as you expected, and it’s often too late to regain what you have lost. The best outcome for this plan is that you turn into a bald fat guy sitting in a red BMW. This book offers a new way of thinking: like the new rich, you can break down your twenty years of retirement into mini retirement episodes and insert them throughout your whole life span. In doing this, you can begin to enjoy your life and work for many years to come.  

Who is the new rich and what is mini retirement? We will talk more about them in the next chapter. Here, we’d like to state that an aspirational lifestyle is not beyond imagination, just the opposite. It is within our reach and can be attained by shifting your mindset and following the guidelines in this book. You can become a member of the “new rich” and turn your dreams into a reality.  

Next, we will explain the main ideas of the book 4-hour Workweek in three parts:

Part One: How does the new rich work and live?

Part Two: How to live like a new rich without quitting your job?

Part Three: How to build an income autopilot?  

Never Split The Difference

Never Split The Difference Full Chapter Brief

Negotiation is everywhere in your daily life: for example, asking your boss to raise your salary, persuading your children go to bed at 9 o’ clock, buying the things at the best price, and so on. All of these actions require communication between people. How do you achieve the desired outcome in a negotiation and convince the other party? In this book, Chris Voss outlines nine negotiation tips that you can apply to every situation in your life, and which will benefit you forever.

Overview | Chapter 1

Hi, welcome to Bookey. Today we will unlock the book Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It.

This book will teach you how to take control in essential conversations in your daily life. Chris Voss is a former FBI negotiator, who often negotiated with kidnappers to free hostages. Once, kidnappers asked the family of a hostage to pay a ransom of $150,000. The family told Voss that they could pay between $50,000 to $85,000. However, Voss successfully managed to lower the price to $4,751, and the hostage was rescued safely. This is only one of the many successful mediations he took part in, over his twenty years of experience, on the basis of which he created a solid theory which can be applied not only to international crises but also to situations that concern our families, careers, intimate relationships, and even parenting.

Voss is also the founder of the Black Swan Group, a Fortune 500 company, and has taught and given lectures at Harvard and MIT. The co-author of this book, Tahl Raz, is also the co-author of the New York Times’ best-selling column, Never Eat Alone, and a content editorial consultant at a number of companies.

If you are a regular user of our platform, you may know that we have unlocked a lot of books on negotiation methods. One of them, Getting To Yes, regarded as having “an unrivaled place in the literature of dispute resolution” introduces the Principled Negotiation, a method researched by the Harvard Negotiation Project. So, is there a difference between Voss’ theory of negotiation and the one introduced in Getting To Yes? There is. The book states that the negotiating parties are “rational actors”, while Voss’s theoretical approach assumes that they are irrational instead. The theory comes from the work of Daniel Kahneman, an American psychologist, who believes that humans have two thought systems: a System 1, which consists of our innate skills that we share with other animals, fast, intuitive and emotional; and a System 2, which is slower, strenuous and rational. Kahneman’s theories have already been covered in our bookey about his work Thinking, Fast and Slow. When putting Kahneman’s theory and negotiations together, the first step is observe and analyze one’s System 1, their emotions, reactions, and feelings. Then, questions can be asked in order to influence their System 1 and receive the desired reaction, granting the initiative to control the other party. In general, this is a kind of negotiation based on emotional control.

We will look at the specific negotiation methods in three parts:

Part One: How to quickly establish a harmonious relationship with the other party at the beginning of the negotiation;

Part Two: How to persuade others to get the results wanted in a negotiation;

Part Three: How to find out unknown information and ensure implementation after negotiation.

Good To Great

Good To Great Full Chapter Brief

If you want your enterprise to go farther, you should not be satisfied with being “good” but should make continuous efforts to achieve “greatness”, so that your company can be more dynamic, more competitive, and last for a really long time. So, how can enterprises break through the bottleneck of being just good? And how do we build an excellent management team? This book puts forward a set of ideas that, if implemented carefully, will enable most companies to improve their operations significantly and be able to become an outstanding company.

Overview | Chapter 1

Hi, welcome to Bookey. Today we will unlock the book From Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t.

There are many famous companies that have experienced a period of glory, leaving their peers far behind. But slowly, they began to not think about innovation, became content with the status quo, stopped seeking to improve, let themselves fall into the trap of complacency and consequently fell from the top to the bottom. The most typical example is Kodak. Kodak was once the world’s leading film manufacturer. Its film recorded people’s sorrow and happiness, glory and dreams for more than 100 years. But unfortunately, they have not been able to keep up with the new era. Some people think they stumbled in the face of camera manufacturers like Sony and Nikon, while many people don’t realize that the world’s first digital camera was actually made by Kodak. The ultimate reason why Kodak failed is down to the fact that they refused to “kill” their signature film, unwilling to move forward toward “greatness”, and eventually died because of its inaction.

The lessons of history tell us that when a company begins to become content with their current status quo, and remain stagnant and complacent, the mansion that they once strove so hard to build up will fall into a precarious state. In order to avoid complacency, we should not merely be satisfied with being good, but also we should continue to strive for greatness, to enable our enterprise to be more dynamic and more long-lasting. So, how to go from good to great? How to make the enterprise break through the bottleneck of excellence? How to set up an excellent management team? This book presents a set of ideas that can help most companies dramatically improve their operations and even become an exceptional company.

The author of this book, Jim Collins, is a renowned management expert and best-selling business author, whose books include Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck—Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In, and, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, of which we’ve also provided you with a bookey. He spent his early years teaching and researching at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award. In 1995, he founded his own Management Lab, where he conducted research on business life with leaders of numerous corporations and social institutions. Collins has also served as senior manager and CEO of world-renowned companies such as Merck & Co, Starbucks, Times Spiegel Group, and McKinsey & Company.

Next, we will talk about the essence of this book from three parts and learn how companies can make the leap from good to great:

Part One: How to build an excellent team;

Part Two: How to create the concept of excellence;

Part Three: How to achieve excellence.

Deep Work

Deep Work Full Chapter Brief

The rapid development of Internet technology and smart products has provided people with a lot of convenience. Meanwhile, all kinds of notifications and messages mean people’s working time has become highly fragmented. The author keenly points out that more than 60% of knowledge workers’ work time is spent on shallow work. This type of work not only yields limited output value but also permanently reduces people’s capacity to work deeply! This book describes how to train the brain to eliminate distractions, improve deep work ability, and create more value.

Overview | Chapter 1

Hi, welcome to Bookey. Today, we will unlock the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.

If you probe into the experiences of some prominent figures in history, you will find that deep work is pivotal to their success in their respective fields. American author Mark Twain’s masterpiece, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, was mostly done in a shed at the Quarry Farm in New York. His workplace, the shed was so far from the main house where his family lived that they had to call him to dinner by blowing a horn. The theoretical physicist Peter Higgs worked in a nearly secluded environment and refused to use a computer. When Higgs won the Nobel Prize, journalists couldn’t even locate him. The novelist J.K. Rowling would stay away from social media while writing Harry Potter. For the first year and a half after opening her Twitter account, she posted only one tweet: “This is the real me, but you won’t be hearing from me often I’m afraid, as pen and paper is my priority at the moment.”

Unlike these highly influential figures, more and more knowledge workers are straying away from deep work. FranklinCovey, a company specializing in training to improve organizational and personal effectiveness, has tracked more than 350,000 employees worldwide. According to its findings, these employees have wasted 40% of their work time on things that don’t matter. In this speed first web-centric era, people have embraced the Internet and remain instantly connected. Knowledge workers dedicate most of their work time to emails, meetings, and social media, yet their essential tasks have been delayed. In this business environment, how can we yield valuable results and stand out in the workplace?

In an age of highly fragmented working time, the approach to deep work proposed in Deep Work makes even more sense. It helps ordinary people become the winners of today’s age. In the meantime, we can get gratification from deep work. While arguing for the importance of deep work, Deep Work also provides a systematic way to train our brains to eliminate distractions. Furthermore, the book helps us improve our ability to think deeply and thus create more value.

The author, Cal Newport, received his Ph.D. in computer science from MIT and is currently an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He is also a bestselling author. Besides this book, Newport’s bestselling works also include How to Win at College: Surprising Secrets for Success from the Country’s Top Students, How to Become a Straight-A Student, How to Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get into College by Standing Out, and So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. He is also the founder of the popular blog Study Hacks, which is dedicated to decoding success patterns in work and study.