Hacker Cinema
Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh
1997 · Film · documentary · 59 min
Directed by Adam Curtis
In 1951, a woman died in Baltimore, U.S.A. She was called Henrietta Lacks. These are cells from her body. They were taken from her just before she died. They have been growing and multiplying ever since. There are now billions of these cells in laboratories around the world. If massed together, they would weigh 400 times her original weight. These cells have transformed modern medicine, but they also became caught up in the politics of our age.
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3 comments on Hacker News
Adam Curtis is honestly one of the greatest documentarians of our time. I first watched Hypernormalization, but then binged everything he ever made a few months ago.
More Adam Curtis recs: the DDT episode and the Kwame Nkrumah episode of Pandora’s Box (the rest are good too), The Way of All Flesh, and The Power of Nightmares. Also, Cant Get You Out Of My Head might be his masterpiece but it’s also not very accessible.
Adam Curtis is great.
I recommend even looking into his older material, such as The Mayfair Set (won a BAFTA Award in 2000). Another older documentary of his that I recommend is The Way of All Flesh (1997) which is a rather remarkable story on HeLa cells with a depth I hadn't encountered before. To give you an idea of the subject matter, here's a quote from Wikipedia:
"HeLa cell contamination has become a pervasive worldwide problem – affecting even the laboratories of many notable physicians, scientists, and researchers, including Jonas Salk. The HeLa contamination problem also contributed to Cold War tensions. The USSR and the USA had begun to cooperate in the war on cancer launched by President Richard Nixon, only to find that the exchanged cells were contaminated by HeLa."
Some of his material is viewabled on BBC iPlayer if you have access to that. His older material can be challenging to find. You can download his complete collection via torrents.
There's an Adam Curtis documentary on the subject, The Way of All Flesh (1997) which seems rather good. Interviews with many of the people involved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R60OUKt8OGI