#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The story of modern medicine and bioethics—and, indeed, race relations—is refracted beautifully, and movingly.”—Entertainment Weekly
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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: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.
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.
Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?
Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
The story flips between the 1950s of Henrietta Lacks and the late 1990s early 2000s of the authors quest to find the story behind the cells that are so important to modern science, particularly medicine.
Henrietta Lacks was a poor black tobacco farmer in the south. A woman who was sure something was wrong but was ignored at first, and her cells harvested for what she thought was a test about her cancer but turned out to be part of a project to try to get cells to grow. Her cells turned out to be perfect, actually almost too perfect, they are actually invading other cultures!
She died of the cancer, her cells have gone on to be a multi-million dollar industry and her family have never seen anything from it, not even healthcare to any meaningful degree, all they've seen really has been things that have convinced them that indeed the medical industry in the US is discriminatory and cares more about the relationship they have with their famous mother's cells than about them.
It's an indictment of the way people are treated and a sad comment on how one woman, poor, black and ill-treated by life, was so failed during her life but has given so much back to science. A woman they even forgot or called by the wrong name for years. A woman who should never be forgotten.
It's worth the read, even if there are some cringeworthy moments with Henrietta's Daughter Deborah but it does say a lot about the life Henrietta must have led. We can only hope that she will remain remembered and maybe, just maybe, achieve some sort of immortality outside her cells.
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1 February, 2011:
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1 February, 2011:
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