Alternative Schooling

I'm posting answers to FAQs about my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as an ongoing series on this blog.  In my last FAQ post, I told the story of how I first learned about HeLa cells at sixteen.  A related question I often get has to do with this one sentence in the book's prologue: "I was a kid who'd failed freshman year at the regular public high school because she never showed up. I'd transferred to an alternative school that offered dream studies instead of biology, so I was taking Defler's class for high-school credit, which meant that I was sitting in a college lecture hall…
As some sharp-eyed reader may have already spotted, the SciencePunk blog has relocated to the Seed Media Group's ScienceBlogs. Let's take a moment to absorb these new surroundings. OK, done? Those of you who have already run back to check sciencepunk.com will find it too has changed substantially. Drama abounds! From today, the whole SciencePunk caboodle is getting cranked up a notch. Wave goodbye to the version 5 we all knew and loved, and say hello to version 6. (Ah, you always wondered what that stray /v5 signified, didn't you? Why not check out v4? Web 1.0-tastic!) The site has…