The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot
Crown (2010), Edition: First Edition, Hardcover (ISBN 1400052173 / 9781400052172)
Nonfiction (science/history), 384 pages
Source: personal copy (gift)
Reason for reading: Independent Literary Awards Non-Fiction short list (runner-up)

Opening Lines: “There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. It’s the late 1940s and she hasn’t yet reached the age of thirty. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her—a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is ‘Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson’.”

Book description: Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Comments: This will be a shorter review than usual because I’m writing it one-handed a couple of days after my shoulder surgery, but it’s appropriate timing for a book with a medical theme. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the story of the medical and scientific progress brought about with the help of the longest-surviving cell line in history; it’s also the story of the woman who unknowingly contributed those cells to research, and the effects of that contribution on the woman’s family

Rebecca Skloot spent years with the story of Henrietta Lacks, who died prematurely of an advanced case pf metastasized cervical cancer – a case that interested medical researchers enough to take samples of her cancer cells for study. Whatever caused her cancer cells to grow so fiercely within her body seemed to continue its effect outside; Henrietta’s cells thrived in culture and became the first successfully-grown, widely-used cell line in biomedical research. Her cells, known to the scientific and medical community as HeLa, are still in use today. But Henrietta was a poor, barely-educated black woman in the mid-twentieth century, being treated in the public wards of Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University Hospital, and she knew nothing of her contribution to the advancement of science. Her tissues were taken without her knowledge or consent. Granted, that was more or less the norm in those days, but her family had no knowledge of it at the time, either, or for years afterward – and when they did learn of it, its effects were devastating.

In order to tell the more personal part of the story, Skloot had to get to know the Lacks family. Her complicated relationship with them makes her a character in her own book, but never the character; even more than Henrietta herself, this story centers on her daughter Deborah, who was just a small child when her mother died. Deborah and the rest of the family don’t fully understand what the continued existence of Henrietta’s cells means – all they really grasp is that, somehow, part of her is still alive, and that people are profiting from that in various ways

Skloot successfully mixes layperson-friendly scientific discussion, considerations of medical and scientific ethics, and a genuine human-interest story into an approachable, fast-paced, and fascinating read. It’s what narrative nonfiction does best – grab and hold a reader’s interest in something she really didn’t expect would interest her all that much. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a memorable and important story – it deserved to be told, and deserves to be known.

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