William F. Connell School of Nursing Dean Katherine Gregory’s selection—The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown, 2010)—is a true story of the woman behind the HeLa cell line and countless modern-day scientific revelations.

Gregory assumed the Connell School deanship in July 2021. She was previously the associate chief nursing officer, women’s and newborn health, research, and innovation at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Gregory also was the scientific founder of a company that aims to improve preterm infant nutrition and growth outcomes through software designed to optimize nursing care and clinical workflows, resulting in a patent in 2020.

A poor, southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, Henrietta Lacks died of cancer on October 4, 1951. However her cells, known as HeLa cells, live on to this day. The genesis of HeLa cells and the discoveries made as a result of Lacks’s contribution to science is remarkable for many reasons, among them the lack of informed consent, as revealed by Skloot. 

“Henrietta Lacks’s story is especially important now because it serves as a reminder to all of us who work in science and health that some of the patients, families, and communities whom we serve do not trust us or the work we do—and for good reason,” Gregory says. “As a scientist and a nurse, I feel that it is our responsibility to build and maintain trust with all of the people whom we serve. New strategies and approaches aimed at developing partnerships are needed. In the era of a pandemic, this is more important to public health than ever before.”

Boston College Law School Dean Vincent D. Rougeau’s selection—The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, 2016)—is fitting for a time when the nation faces a reckoning of systemic racism and deep-rooted racial injustice.

Cora and Caesar are two slaves attempting to escape from a Georgia plantation in this fictional tale of the historical 19th-century path to freedom. Through secret trails, routes, and safe houses, the protagonists journey to avoid certain recapture and death at the hands of the slavecatcher, Ridgeway. Whitehead’s stirring novel won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction, among other accolades.

A vocal advocate for change in legal education, Rougeau has been dean of Boston College Law School since 2011. The author of his own book, Christians in the American Empire: Faith and Citizenship in the New World Order, he has done extensive research on religious identity, citizenship, and community organization in multicultural societies. He is the inaugural director of the Boston College Forum on Racial Justice in America and president of the Association of American Law Schools. In July 2021, he will be inaugurated as the 33rd president of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

“I had the great blessing, when I was six years dean in Gasson Hall, of hosting the Baccalaureate Mass in December. Fr. Neenan’s homily every year was about Camus’ The Fall, and he certainly made you want to read that book, as I did several times in those years. In the great spirit of Fr. Neenan, I’ve got my copy of a book I haven’t read since junior year English—Camus’ The Plague. [It] is as powerful as I remember it, even as it seemed such an alien work back in 1983. Now, living through it in this very different moment as a middle-aged academic administrator, it is giving me a little much-needed sustenance these days.”

Before becoming provost, Quigley served as dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Boston College from 2008 to 2014. As provost and dean of faculties, he has served as co-chair of the University Strategic Planning Initiative, overseeing the hiring of 250 new faculty and guiding the University’s academic programs and curricula—all while teaching history classes of his own. Quigley lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Megan DeMott-Quigley, and they are the proud parents of three sons.