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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

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Abstract

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a Southern tobacco breeder who worked the same soil as her enslaved ancestors, yet her cells–taken without her knowledge–became one of the most eminent tools in medicine. The prototypic “everlasting” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, tho’ she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could put all HeLa cells, they’d matter much than 50 million function tons–as more as a 100 Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were indispensable for processing the polio vaccine; exposed secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped advance to grievous advances same in vitro impregnation, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and oversubscribed by the billions.

Now Wife Skloot takes us on an preternatural traveling, from the colored ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the fifties to stark white laboratories with freezers stuffed of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s ,little, vanishing hometown of Clover, Virginia-a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo-to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren are and battle with the gift of her cells.

Henrietta’s did not know of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her decease, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her spouse and children in investigate without aware respond. And tho’ the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar manufacture that sells   natural materials, her ancestry never saw any other profits. As Rebecca Skloot so bright shows, the account of the Lacks family-past and present-is inextricably connected to the gloomy chronicle of research on African Americans, the alteration of bioethics, and the eligible battles over whether we command the things we are made of.

Over the decennium it took to expose this taradiddle, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family-especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to inform about her mother’s cells. She was exhausted with questions: Had scientists cloned her parent? Did it ache 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 parent was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children cannot have health insurance?

Intimate in feeling, surprising in scope, and out to put eat, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of technological uncovering, as well as its human consequences.