POTSDAM -- David "Sonny" Lacks will deliver the Van Sickle Endowed Lecture as Clarkson University celebrates the start of the 2012-2013 academic year with a convocation on Sunday, Aug, 26, at 7 p.m. in Cheel Arena. The event is open to the public free of charge.

Lacks' lecture is being presented in conjunction with this year's first-year student common reading assignment, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, which the entire Clarkson and North Country community has been invited to read.

Sonny Lacks, a son of Henrietta Lacks, will present a discussion about his mother and her important contribution to science. He will share what it meant to find out -- decades after the fact -- that his mother's cells were being used in laboratories around the world, bought and sold by the billions.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells, taken without her knowledge in 1951, went on to become the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory. Those cells, nicknamed HeLa, became one of the most important tools in modern medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more.

Although Henrietta died in 1951, her cells -- alive and growing to this day -- are still the most widely used cell line in the world.

Sonny Lacks' message will give a sincere first-person perspective on the collision between ethics, race and the commercialization of human tissue, and how the experience changed the Lacks family forever.

Visiting Clarkson with Lacks will be his nephew, Ron, Henrietta's grandson. Both will participate in a discussion followed by an audience question and answer session, moderated by Associate Professor of History Laura Ettinger.

The public is also invited to a discussion of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks on Thursday, Sept. 13, at 7 p.m. in the Potsdam Civic Center. Professors JoAnn Rogers and Laura Ettinger will facilitate the discussion.