The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot
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, they are still alive today, though she has been dead
for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown
onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a
hundred Empire State Buildings. 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.
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.
Over
the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in
the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah,
who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed
with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when
researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space?
What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at
the age of fifteen? 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.
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