Tennessee Mom Calls Book On Cervical Cancer Cells 'Pornographic'; HuffingtonPost.com, 9/8/15

Dhyana Taylor, HuffingtonPost.com; Tennessee Mom Calls Book On Cervical Cancer Cells 'Pornographic' :

"A mother from Knoxville, Tennessee, believes the New York Times bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has too much graphic information for her 15-year-old son and should not have been assigned as summer reading.

"I consider the book pornographic," Jackie Sims told WBIR-Knoxville. "There's so many ways to say things without being graphic in nature, and that's the problem I have with the book."

The book, by science writer Rebecca Skloot, details the true story of a poor black tobacco farmer whose cervical cancer cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951. The cells, which scientists referred to as HeLa, went on to become a vital tool in medicine, helping to develop the polio vaccine, in vitro fertilization and other major scientific breakthroughs. The book was published in 2011 and has won numerous awards from medical and scientific organizations...

The anti-censorship group Kids' Right to Read Project said that book banning has been on the rise since 2012, and cited 49 book-banning incidents in 2013 -- a 53 percent rise over 2012. The American Library Association says that 311 challenges were filed in 2014 against a variety of books."