Almost 60 years ago, doctors took cells from a cancer patient in Baltimore. She died soon afterward, forgotten to everyone except her family. But her cells became immortal and famous - known as HeLa. HeLa cells were the first to grow reliably in a laboratory, and they're still the most widely used today. They're responsible for everything from the Polio vaccine to gene mapping. They've ridden into space and into oblivion on atomic weapons.

David Broder of The Washington Post joins Bob to talk politics. Then, entertainment critic David Kipen joins Bob to talk about this week's Oscar nominations and the passing of J.D. Salinger. And, in this week's installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, Bob talks with curator Dan Gediman about the essay of Ben Lucien Burman.

> Bach's Cello Suites are one of the most recognizable pieces of music ever composed. The melodies are ubiquitous in movies, television, commercials - and they have been played at major world events: the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11 memorial services, Ted Kennedy's memorial service most recently. But the Cello Suites were almost never heard. For centuries after Bach died, the music was lost, discovered accidentally and then popularized by the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals.

With concerns about mounting national debt so intense now that President Obama has called for a partial spending freeze, Bob turns to David Walker for fiscal opinion and analysis. Walker is a former comptroller general of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office and he has just written Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility.

> In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, a high-level Pentagon official and Vietnam War strategist, leaked 7,000 pages of top secret documents about the war to the press. It was a Defense Department study never meant to be seen by the public. Its publication in the New York Times proved the war was based on lies and eventually led to president Richard Nixon's resignation and the end of America's involvement in Vietnam.

> In Alabama, Lynne Goebbell was fired from her job at an insulation company because she refused to remove a "Kerry for President" bumper sticker from her car. In Indiana, Daniel Wynn was let go after eight years as a machinist because he had a few beers after work. The company's owner believed that drinking was a sin. And Christine DeMark was fired from her job as a sales rep because her employer found out that she carried a gene linked to Huntington's disease.

This month, The Library of Congress named young adult novelist Katherine Paterson the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. She is this position's second appointee, and has chosen the theme "Read for Your Life" for her two year tenure. Paterson is a two-time Newbery Award winner, for Bridget to Terabithia and Jacob Have I Loved and two-time winner of the National Book Award for The Great Gilly Hopkins and The Master Puppeteer.

In his book The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy, writer, activist and academic Raj Patel raises the question: if economics is about choices, who gets to make them? Patel writes about economics, but also about the social and ecological effects of the global market.

Barack Obama made history by being the first African American elected to the nation's highest post - a feat no woman has yet accomplished. Journalist Anne Kornblut covered the last Presidential election for the Washington Post and she discusses the gender issue in Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and What It Will Take for a Woman to Win.

Social thinker and author Jeremy Rifkin's book The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis looks at emerging scientific studies that show humans are not naturally aggressive and self-interested, but fundamentally empathetic. Rifkin's book is a new interpretation of the history of civilization, focusing on the development of human empathy through the present time.