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THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

by Rebecca Skloot ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2010

Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...

A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.

In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HEALTH & FITNESS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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BOOK REVIEW

edited by Rebecca Skloot and Floyd Skloot

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Jon Krakauer

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Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Contingency has been on my mind quite often these days. What would life look like today if the ancestors of the first land-dwelling vertebrates had two legs instead of four? How would non-avian dinosaurs continue to have evolved if they had not been wiped out 65 million years ago? What if, like many other prehistoric apes, our own ancestors fell into extinction during the Pliocene? Any one of these events would have changed the history of life on earth, and even though there are not answers to these questions they still remind me of how historical quirks can have major effects.

Though it has nothing at all to do with fossils or evolution, Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is also a tale of contingency. In February of 1951 doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital removed cancerous cells from the cervix of a 30 year old African American woman who had come in complaining of a painful "knot" inside of her. She had no idea that the sample of her cells had been taken, but this small event of one woman's life would end up changing the world in ways that no one expected.

This woman was Henrietta Lacks , and even though she died from the cancer in October of 1951 the descendants of the cells taken from her over a half century ago are still thriving in laboratories around the world. Because of a biological quirk scientists were able to turn her cells into the first "immortal" cell line, called HeLa, the study of which has greatly increased our knowledge of ourselves and led to the effective treatment of numerous diseases. Her cells have affected the lives of people all over the world, and this makes it all the more shameful that, until now, almost no one knew anything about her.

The true strength of Skloot's book is that it is not a simple celebration of science. Innumerable articles and several books have been written about the HeLa cell line before, but they largely ignored Henrietta and her family. The story of the poor black woman who had her cells taken from her without her knowledge or consent just did not register with most writers (especially since it was decades before anyone knew her real name), and the attitudes of journalists and scientists made Henrietta's family increasingly bitter about the entire affair. While medical companies made millions off of Henrietta's cells they remained poor and could barely afford health insurance even in the best of times. And as famous as Henrietta's cells were her family knew almost nothing about what happened to her or what was taken from her. While Skloot ably covers the science of HeLa, the real story is the personal drama of Henrietta and her family, in which Skloot comes to play a substantial part.

As I read through this story of science, race relations, medicine, and poverty I could not help but wonder how things would have been if small events had turned out differently. What if doctors and scientists had informed the Lacks family about HeLa earlier, and what would have happened if the scientists that finally did were not so inept at communicating what had happened to Henrietta? What if Skloot had never followed her deep desire to know who Henrietta was, or what if the Lacks family, frustrated that another journalist was coming around asking questions, decided to ignore Skloot's persistent phone calls? Would Henrietta's life have remained a mystery even to her own family?

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a triumph of science writing (it is truly one of the best nonfiction books I have ever read), and I was deeply affected by it on a personal level. The story reaffirmed that small events can have major repercussions, and as sad and angry as the tale of the Lacks family made me by the end of the book I was glad that Skloot had worked so hard to reach them. Through something as simple as wanting to learn more about Henrietta's life Skloot and the Lacks family were able to create a fitting tribute to Henrietta and her legacy. For the first time, the most important woman in modern medicine is having her story told, and I truly hope that it gets the attention it deserves.

You can contribute to the Henrietta Lacks Foundation here .

[Be sure to check out the reviews of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks at the New York Times and Not Exactly Rocket Science , as well.]

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Science News

Book review: the immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot.

A new book tells the story of the unknown woman behind the famous cells

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By Laura Sanders

March 12, 2010 at 12:22 pm

Combining careful reporting with vivid narration, science writer Rebecca Skloot describes how cancerous cells growing in the cervix of a poor black tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks changed the face of modern medical science. In the book, Skloot expertly explains the science behind the cells and their significance, but more importantly, she makes it clear that the story is not just about the cells’ utility to scientists. It’s the story of the unknown woman behind the famous cells. A dime-sized sample of Lacks’ cells, sliced away in 1951 without permission, quickly became an invaluable research tool. Unlike normal cells that stop dividing soon after they leave the body, these cancer cells have a special genetic structure that allows them to live on forever. Even now, almost 60 years after Lacks’ death, tubes, flasks and beakers of her cells flourish in laboratories around the world. They are grown under the name HeLa cells, short for Henrietta Lacks, though many students still learn the cells came from Helen Lane — a name doctors originally made up to hide Lacks’ identity. Studies using HeLa cells have led to new cancer drugs, flu treatments, the first polio vaccine and countless other medical advances. Lacks’ family was left in the dark about the research, confused and angry about what they perceived as scientists making big money from stolen cells while the family couldn’t afford health care. Whether they should have shared in the profits, Skloot refrains from judging. Instead, she paints a nuanced portrait of a complicated, emotion-laden sequence of events, raising many more questions than she answers.

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Physiology News Magazine

• Summer 2013 - Issue Number 91

Book review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

Sarah Hall Cardiff University, UK

Keith Siew University of Cambridge, UK

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.91.51

Even if they’ve never used a HeLa cell in their own research, most physiologists probably know a colleague who has, or have read a paper reporting data from these cells. Over the decades, HeLa cells have led to important advances in gene mapping and in vitro fertilisation, as well as the life-saving development of vaccines for polio and cancer. Yet, despite this, some could not tell you that the acronym HeLa refers to Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer aged 31 and who, arguably, has contributed more to biomedical science than any other person to date. Henrietta’s story and the development of the HeLa cell line are at the heart of Rebecca Skloot’s first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks .

Skloot’s account of Henrietta’s life is told with sensitivity and genuine warmth; the explanation of attempts to culture cells and the subsequent commercialisation of the cell line have sufficient scientific integrity, despite the author’s lack of scientific training. Part historical account, part detective story and part ethical debate, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks combines these narrative threads into an absorbing and challenging book that should be on every physiologist’s reading list.

Henrietta was born in 1920 to a family of tobacco farmers in Virginia. After her marriage to David ‘Day’ Lacks, she settled in Baltimore to work and raise her family of five children. When she became ill, she went to Johns Hopkins University which, at the time, was the only place offering medical treatment without charge to the black community. In that same hospital, Dr George Gey and his team were working to develop the first human cell culture, but were finding little success. They were excited when a sample of Henrietta’s cancer cells, unlike any of the other tissue samples they had tried, grew quickly and easily in the culture lab.

Unbeknown to Henrietta’s family, news of this breakthrough spread throughout the scientific community as Dr Gey began distributing his ‘HeLa’ cells to other researchers. They were first sent to local labs, where they continued to replicate, then across the country and eventually all over the world. Widespread scientific interest in these cells rapidly birthed a multi-billion dollar industry that revolutionised medical research, and the book relays how reputations and fortunes were made, while Henrietta remained anonymous and her family unaware. It was not until some 20 years after her death that the Lacks family would learn the life-changing news of their mother’s “immortal” cells and their subsequent exploitation for profit. The author’s role in this aspect of the story detracts somewhat from the main focus of the book, but the family’s reactions to the news reveal a heart-breaking chasm between cutting-edge science and the lives of these ordinary Americans.

Skloot has managed to capture the emotional story of Henrietta Lacks and her family, while diligently chronicling the development of a new scientific arena and documenting what could be considered the first case study of medical research ethics. A quick search of the current literature reveals almost 2000 papers using HeLa cells were published last year alone. Even if you don’t read any of these papers, it is worth making time to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks as a complex and thought-provoking reminder of the broader context of this scientific endeavour.

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Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Skloot)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Rebecca Skloot, 2010 Crown Publishing 381 pp. ISBN-13: 9781400052189 Summary   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. ( From the publisher .)

Author Bio   Rebecca Skloot is a science writer whose articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, O-The Oprah Magazine, Discover, Prevention, Glamour , and others.

She has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s Radio Lab and PBS’s NOVA ScienceNow , and is a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine. Her work has been anthologized in several collections, including The Best Food Writing and The Best Creative Nonfiction .

She is a former vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, and has taught nonfiction in the creative writing programs at the University of Memphis and the University of Pittsburgh, and science journalism at New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program. She blogs about science, life, and writing at Culture Dish, hosted by Seed magazine. This is her first book.  ( From the publisher .)

Book Reviews One of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I've read in a very long time. A thorny and provocative book about cancer, racism, scientific ethics and crippling poverty, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks also floods over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had managed to distill and purify the more addictive qualities of "Erin Brockovich," Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The Andromeda Strain. More than 10 years in the making, it feels like the book Ms. Skloot was born to write. It signals the arrival of a raw but quite real talent.... [ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks ] has brains and pacing and nerve and heart, and it is uncommonly endearing. Dwight Garner - New York Times Rebecca Skloot introduces us to the "real live woman," the children who survived her, and the interplay of race, poverty, science and one of the most important medical discoveries of the last 100 years. Skloot narrates the science lucidly, tracks the racial politics of medicine thoughtfully and tells the Lacks family's often painful history with grace. She also confronts the spookiness of the cells themselves, intrepidly crossing into the spiritual plane on which the family has come to understand their mother's continued presence in the world. Science writing is often just about "the facts." Skloot's book, her first, is far deeper, braver and more wonderful. Lisa Margonelli - New York Times Book Review Skloot's vivid account...reads like a novel. The prose is unadorned, crisp and transparent.... This book, labeled "science--cultural studies," should be treated as a work of American history. It's a deftly crafted investigation of a social wrong committed by the medical establishment, as well as the scientific and medical miracles to which it led. Skloot's compassionate account can be the first step toward recognition, justice and healing. Eric Roston - Washington Post Science journalist Skloot makes a remarkable debut with this multilayered story about “faith, science, journalism, and grace.” It is also a tale of medical wonders and medical arrogance, racism, poverty and the bond that grows, sometimes painfully, between two very different women—Skloot and Deborah Lacks—sharing an obsession to learn about Deborah’s mother, Henrietta, and her magical, immortal cells. Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black mother of five in Baltimore when she died of cervical cancer in 1951. Without her knowledge, doctors treating her at Johns Hopkins took tissue samples from her cervix for research. They spawned the first viable, indeed miraculously productive, cell line—known as HeLa. These cells have aided in medical discoveries from the polio vaccine to AIDS treatments. What Skloot so poignantly portrays is the devastating impact Henrietta’s death and the eventual importance of her cells had on her husband and children. Skloot’s portraits of Deborah, her father and brothers are so vibrant and immediate they recall Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family . Writing in plain, clear prose, Skloot avoids melodrama and makes no judgments. Letting people and events speak for themselves, Skloot tells a rich, resonant tale of modern science, the wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit society’s most vulnerable people. Publishers Weekly This distinctive work skillfully puts a human face on the bioethical questions surrounding the HeLa cell line. Henrietta Lacks, an African American mother of five, was undergoing treatment for cancer at Johns Hopkins University in 1951 when tissue samples were removed without her knowledge or permission and used to create HeLa, the first "immortal" cell line. HeLa has been sold around the world and used in countless medical research applications, including the development of the polio vaccine. Science writer Skloot, who worked on this book for ten years, entwines Lacks's biography, the development of the HeLa cell line, and her own story of building a relationship with Lacks's children. Full of dialog and vivid detail, this reads like a novel, but the science behind the story is also deftly handled. Verdict: While there are other titles on this controversy (e.g., Michael Gold's A Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman's Immortal Legacy—and the Medical Scandal It Caused ), this is the most compelling account for general readers, especially those interested in questions of medical research ethics. Highly recommended. — Carla Lee, Univ. of Virginia Lib., Charlottesville Library Journal ( Starred review .) Writing with a novelist's artistry, a biologist's expertise, and the zeal of an investigative reporter, Skloot tells a truly astonishing story of racism and poverty, science and conscience, spirituality and family driven by a galvanizing inquiry into the sanctity of the body and the very nature of the life force. Booklist A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later. In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre-civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field. Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture, and Petri dish politics. Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips) • Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction • Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks :

1. Start by unraveling the complicated history of Henrietta Lacks's tissue cells. Who did what with the cells, when, where and for what purpose? Who benefited, scientifically, medically, and monetarily?

2. What are the specific issues raised in the book—legally and ethically? Talk about the 1980s John Moore case: the appeal court decision and its reversal by the California Supreme Court.

3. Follow-up to Question #2: Should patient consent be required to store and distribute their tissue for research? Should doctors disclose their financial interests? Would this make any difference in achieving fairness? Or is this not a matter of fairness or an ethical issue to begin with?

4. What are the legal ramifications regarding payment for tissue samples? Consider the the RAND corporation estimation that 304 million tissue samples, from 178 million are people, are held by labs.

5. What are the spiritual and religious issues surrounding the living tissue of people who have died? How do Henrietta's descendants deal with her continued "presence" in the world...and even the cosmos (in space)?

6. Were you bothered when researcher Robert Stevenson tells author Skloot that "scientists don’t like to think of HeLa cells as being little bits of Henrietta because it’s much easier to do science when you dissociate your materials from the people they come from"? Is that an ugly outfall of scientific resarch...or is it normal, perhaps necessary, for a scientist to distance him/herself? If "yes" to the last part of that question, what about research on animals...especially for research on cosmetics?

7. What do you think of the incident in which Henrietta's children "see" their mother in the Johns Hopkins lab? How would you have felt? Would you have sensed a spiritual connection to the life that once created those cells...or is the idea of cells simply too remote to relate to?

8. Is race an issue in this story? Would things have been different had Henrietta been a middle class white woman rather than a poor African American woman? Consider both the taking of the cell sample without her knowledge, let alone consent... and the questions it is raising 60 years later when society is more open about racial injustice?

9. Author Rebecca Skloot is a veteran science writer. Did you find it enjoyable to follow her through the ins-and-outs of the laboratory and scientific research? Or was this a little too "petri-dishish" for you?

10. What did you learn from reading The Immortal Life ? What surprised you the most? What disturbed you the most?

( Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks .) top of page (summary)

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the immortal life of henrietta lacks.

Science journalist Rebecca Skloot unravels the story behind the first immortal human cells, known by the code name HeLa. Skloot’s fascination with these cells began as a teen in a biology class when her professor mentioned that what scientists know about cancer cells came from studying the cells of a woman named Henrietta Lacks. He went on to state that Henrietta died from an aggressive form of cervical cancer in 1951. Without Henrietta’s knowledge or consent, samples of her tumor were cultured. Although scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in order to study them, they had had no luck --- but Henrietta’s cancer cells not only lived, they reproduced rapidly. HeLa cells continued to reproduce, dividing constantly and indefinitely; hence, they are “immortal.”

"As Skloot skillfully weaves together the stories of Henrietta, the evolution of her immortal cells and the reactions of her family members, readers will find themselves entranced."

Henrietta’s cells are still reproducing. They are bought and sold to labs all over the world by the billions. It is said that if one were to weigh all of Henrietta’s cells that have been grown since she died, the total would be a staggering 50 million metric tons. These immortal cells have been one of the most important innovations for modern science and medicine because scientists can study the effects of experiments they cannot perform on living people. HeLa cells were onboard during the first space mission so scientists could study what happens to human cells in space. Because of HeLa cells, scientists know the effects an atom bomb has on human tissue. Henrietta’s cells were also instrumental in developing the vaccine for polio. They have been the cells used in studies for in vitro fertilization, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, and much, much more.

Skloot’s teacher off-handedly mentioned that Henrietta was African-American. But Skloot’s questioning about her personal life met a dead end, and the consequent researching revealed nothing about her. She became obsessed with Henrietta, and her fascination turned into a passion that she pursued for 10 years in order to write this book.

One of Skloot’s driving questions was about Henrietta’s family: Did she have children? Did they know about their mother’s cells and their contribution to science? She not only learns the answers to these questions, she also forms a relationship with Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah. Along the way, we learn about Henrietta’s life. As part of a poor tobacco farm family, young Henrietta lived with her grandfather after her parents died. She and the rest of the family worked the same tobacco fields that their ancestors worked as slaves. After marrying her cousin, David, Henrietta’s life continued to be difficult. She had her first child when she was barely 14. The second child she bore had developmental challenges and was reluctantly institutionalized. Despite her hard life, the people who knew Henrietta remembered her as beautiful, outgoing and hospitable.

As Skloot skillfully weaves together the stories of Henrietta, the evolution of her immortal cells and the reactions of her family members, readers will find themselves entranced. Exploring the topic of scientific exploitation --- in which her cells have been used and sold without family knowledge or consent --- leads to a description of the historical use of African-American research subjects and to a discussion of the policies and ethics governing the use of patients’ tissues. During the course of the book, we travel with the writer to Henrietta’s unmarked grave, to scientific laboratories, and to a church service. We are present during a touching scene in which two of Henrietta’s children examine HeLa cells.

Interspersing these human elements with scientific explanations, Skloot has fashioned a compelling multi-layered tale that will keep readers unable to resist turning pages until they reach the end.

Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon on January 22, 2011

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

• Publication Date: April 4, 2017
• Genres: Biography , Nonfiction , Science
• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Broadway Books
• ISBN-10: 0804190100
• ISBN-13: 9780804190107

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Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The compelling story of a single cell line that revolutionised medical and scientific research—cultured from cells taken unknowingly from an African American woman nearly 70 years ago.

Title : The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Author : Rebecca Skloot Genre : Nonfiction (Biography) Originally published : 2 February 2010 Finished reading : 30 November 2019

📖 Get this book on Amazon 📖

I’m sure you’ve heard of George Floyd —the one name that has been reverberating through social media and the press for days. But you may not have heard of another name, also belonging to an African American: Henrietta Lacks .

Henrietta did not die at the hands of white policemen. But she—and her family—had also been unfairly and sometimes cavalierly disregarded, as the scientific community sought only to advance their own interests.

Henrietta Lacks was a woman who unknowingly donated her cells at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951, beginning what was the first, and, for many years, the only human cell line able to reproduce indefinitely. Her cells, known as HeLa cells, remain a remarkably durable and prolific line of cells used in research around the world.

The above paragraph is taken from the Johns Hopkins Medicine page dedicated to Henrietta Lacks . The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells her story.

(This is another one of my lengthier book reviews, more of my reflections after reading the book than a concise recommendation. I’ve also included an amazing TED-Ed video as well as links for further reading on Henrietta and the HeLa cells. I do refer to a few parts of the book, so if you’re highly allergic to spoilers like me, you may wish to read the entirety of this review only after having read the book yourself.)

An intersection between science and the humanities

This book is, doubtless, an intersection between science and ethics; or rather, it is a fusion, so deeply intertwined are the two that they cannot be regarded as separate entities. Indeed, at the risk of sounding cliché, the ultimate aim of advancing science is to benefit humanity. And, arguably, it is only with a deep sense of humanity that we can continue to further our progress in science—and to steer it in the right direction. Therefore, we cannot endeavour to pursue one without the other.

The story of the HeLa cells is fascinating because of the profound significance of its discovery to science and medicine. It makes one wonder, if Henrietta’s cells had not been taken and cultured in George Gey’s lab, would science have advanced as rapidly as it did in the last seventy years? Would scientists have found other ways to carry out the same research? Would other cultured cell lines, though not immortal, have been an acceptable substitute for HeLa cells? I believe this is likely. However, there is no denying the tremendous importance of HeLa cells to science.

Our understanding of biomedical ethics has evolved greatly over the years

Perhaps more heavily, the weight of this story lies with the biomedical ethics involved. Unsurprisingly, many of the ethical practices and respect for patients’ rights that we now deem fundamental were not at all commonplace during Henrietta’s time. It thus becomes difficult to reconcile the currently established frameworks with the callous indifference of scientists and researchers in the past, when such principles were unheard of. What we may now perceive as reprehensible could have been common practice amongst the general scientific community decades ago.

Indeed, when Dr. Chester M. Southam began injecting patients with HeLa cells—cancer cells—without their knowledge in 1954, there was no formal research oversight in the United States. Many doctors testified before the Board of Regents and in the media on Southam’s behalf, saying they had been conducting similar research for decades. They argued that it was unnecessary to disclose all information to research subjects or get consent in all cases, and that Southam’s behaviour was considered ethical in the field. Southam’s lawyers argued, “If the whole profession is doing it, how can you call it ‘unprofessional conduct’?”

In the wake of this saga, scientists said medical research was doomed. In a letter to the editor of Science , one of them warned, “When we are prevented from attempting seemingly innocuous studies of cancer behaviour in humans … we may mark 1966 as the year in which all medical progress ceased.” From reading of this and other cases, including the controversy over John Moore’s cells, a recurring theme surfaces: the perennial tug-of-war between the principles of bioethics and the advancement of scientific research .

Since the turn of the century, politicians had been introducing state and federal laws with hopes of regulating human experimentation, but physicians and researchers always protested. The bills were repeatedly voted down for fear of interfering with the progress of science, even though other countries—including, ironically, Prussia—had enacted regulations governing human research as early as 1891.

Even in Moore’s case, this apprehension perpetuated. The press ran story after story quoting lawyers and scientists saying that a victory for Moore would “create chaos for researchers” and “[sound] the death knell to the university physician-scientist.” They called it “a threat to the sharing of tissue for research purposes,” and worried that patients would block the progress of science by holding out for excessive profits, even with cells that weren’t worth millions like Moore’s.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court of California ruled against him. It said that ruling in Moore’s favour might “destroy the economic incentive to conduct important medical research,” and that giving patients property rights in their tissues might “hinder research by restricting access to the necessary raw materials,” creating a field where “with every cell sample a researcher purchases a ticket in a litigation lottery.”

Yet, upholding ethical principles and practices and the continued advancement of science do not have to be mutually exclusive. Following Southam’s case, despite scientists’ fears, the ethical crackdown did not slow scientific progress. In fact, research flourished—much of it involving HeLa.

Today, top medical institutions and research facilities around the world are committed to upholding the highest bioethical standards. And scientific progress has only accelerated.

Medical ethics continue to be of great relevance today

Henrietta’s story spotlights several oft-discussed bioethical issues, including informed consent, privacy of medical records, and communication with tissue donors and research participants. There have since been paradigm shifts in the way these issues are approached and regulated.

Nevertheless, medical ethics remains an important pillar of biomedical research and discovery. Contentious cases continue to emerge, with a groundswell of debate fuelled by multiple conflicting views. Among them are the cases of Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans, as well as dissension over the applications of biotechnology, particularly the use of genetic engineering (CRIPSR/Cas9) to modify the human genome. As artificial intelligence invades into the medical field, new forms of privacy concerns are arising.

It is evident, therefore, that as scientific and biomedical breakthroughs emerge at an exponential pace, propelled by the advent of increasingly sophisticated technologies, ethical quandaries will only continue to arise—many of them without precedent. To confront these quagmires, science will have to look to the humanities more than ever before.

Rebecca Skloot tells stories not just of Science, but of people

Beyond uncovering the intriguing science behind the HeLa cells and the innumerable scientific and medical breakthroughs they have abetted, it was the element of humanity infused into the story that stood out to me most poignantly.

Rebecca Skloot’s persistence to uncover the HeLa story was moving; it was this same unrelenting attitude—coupled with her tact, sensitivity, and respect—that eventually won her the trust of the Lacks family and conceived a lasting friendship with Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah Lacks.

It was also extremely heartwarming to see Deborah’s transformation as she and Rebecca together probed deeper into the unknowns of Henrietta’s story. There were many stirring scenes in the book, but one in particular remains in my mind—when the Lackses followed Skloot into the world of science, just as she had followed them into the world of faith.

When two seemingly disparate worlds blend into one

In 2001, an Austrian researcher at Johns Hopkins named Christoph Lengauer invited the family to his lab. When Deborah and her brother Zakariyya visited, he led them to the basement, where they “saw” their mother for the first time. Warming frozen test tubes of HeLa in their hands and watching in wonder as a cell divided into two under a microscope, it was a life-changing experience for both Deborah and Zakariyya.

Scientists don’t like to think of HeLa cells as being little bits of Henrietta because it’s much easier to do science when you dissociate your materials from the people they come from.

I was moved by Lengauer’s sincerity and the compassion he showed towards the Lacks family. I respect him for that—for reaching out, for wishing to thank the person whose cells were the foundation of his work—especially when most scientists would rather ignore the messy human provenance of these materials and see them only as cells for biological experimentation.

“Scientists don’t like to think of HeLa cells as being little bits of Henrietta because it’s much easier to do science when you dissociate your materials from the people they come from,” a researcher named Robert Stevenson tells Skloot in one of the many ethical discussions seeded throughout the book.

All in all, this book has fused both science writing and the human element resplendently, while raising pertinent questions regarding bioethics that has far-reaching implications for science as a whole—as much in history as in our future.

My favourite quotes from this book

(All quotes are arranged in chronological order as they appear in the book, with the chapters indicated in parentheses.)

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.  — ELIE WIESEL from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Epigraph)

“She’s the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother is so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Chapter 21: Night Doctors)

When he asked if she was okay, her eyes welled with tears and she said, “Like I’m always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can’t do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Chapter 33: The Hospital for the Negro Insane)

“Like the Bible said,” Gary whispered, “man brought nothing into this world and he’ll carry nothing out. Sometime we care about stuff too much. We worry when there’s nothing to worry about.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Chapter 35: Soul Cleansing)

She stroked Davon’s hair. “I don’t know how I’m going to go,” she said. “I just hope it’s nice and calm. But I tell you one thing, I don’t want to be immortal if it mean living forever, cause then everybody else just die and get old in front of you while you stay the same, and that’s just sad.” Then she smiled. “But maybe I’ll come back as some HeLa cells like my mother, that way we can do good together out there in the world.” She paused and nodded again. “I think I’d like that.” ― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Chapter 38: The Long Road to Clover)

Learn more about the HeLa cells

Resources and further reading

• The Legacy of Henrietta Lacks – Johns Hopkins Medicine
• HeLa cells (1951) – British Society for Immunology
• Henrietta Lacks’ ‘Immortal’ Cells – Smithsonian Magazine
• 5 important ways Henrietta Lacks changed medical science – STAT

• NOT EXACTLY ROCKET SCIENCE

Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Look in any biomedical laboratory, and you will find HeLa cells. Over 50 million tonnes of these cells have been grown in churning vats of liquid all over the world. They have been one of the most important tools in modern medicine , pushing forward our understanding of cancer and other diseases, and underpinning the polio vaccine, IVF, cloning, and more. None of these advanced would have been feasible without HeLa. Most scientists have used or seen them but most have no idea about their origin. It’s time to find out.

In early 1951, there was only one place in the world where HeLa cells could be found – the cervix of a poor, black tobacco farmer called Henrietta Lacks. She was treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital where, without her knowledge or consent, doctors took some cells from her tumour and cultured them. They became HeLa – the immortal line of cells that would change the world. Henrietta died in the same year. Her family only learned of her “immortality” more than 20 years later, when scientists started using them in research, again without informed consent, to better understand Henrietta’s cells.   The cells launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials but her family cannot afford health insurance.

The remarkably story of Henrietta’s life, cells and family are now coming to light, narrated in an equally remarkable book – Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks . Skloot is a veteran science journalist and first-time author and her debut is thrilling and original non-fiction that refuses to be shoehorned into anything as trivial as a genre. It is equal parts popular science, historical biography and detective novel. It reads as evocatively as any work of fiction, with dialogue, characters and settings vividly reconstructed from archived material, legal documents and thousands of hours of interviews. Like a mystery, the chronology flits back and forth from the first and last days of Henrietta’s life, the decades of discovery that followed her death and Skloot’s own modern-day quest to uncover the story.

Indeed, Skloot repeatedly appears as a character in her own book, narrating her journey from first hearing about HeLa cells in a classroom to her attempts to contact and support the Lacks family. This literary device could easily have come across as self-aggrandising but Skloot fully earns her status as the story’s third protagonist. Her narration reveals the trials that the Lacks family have undergone since Henrietta’s cells went global, and the sheer amount of trust it took to uncover the details of this story.

I did, indeed, say “third protagonist”. This is really a book about three heroines – the two whose names grace the cover and Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah Lacks. Skloot’s personal mission to tell this story and Deborah’s quest to know about her mother’s life and legacy are central parts of Henrietta’s story and they form some of the book’s most compelling segments.

I write this review as someone who isn’t typically a fan of historical non-fiction. Particularly in popular science, I often find descriptions of researchers to be distracting attempts at shoehorning in a human element that is out of keeping with the rest of the book. Not so here – this work has the most human of stories at its core, and never deviates from that important, and often heartbreaking, humanity. When science appears, it does so effortlessly, with explanations of cell anatomy or techniques like “fluorescence in situ hybridization” seamlessly worked into descriptions of the coloured wards of Johns Hopkins hospital to Lacks’s hometown of Clover, Virginia.

Skloot’s prose is witty, lyrical, economical and authoritative. But The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is not a comfortable read. I visibly winced at descriptions of Henrietta’s blackened, burned skin after multiple rounds of devastating radiation treatments. I put the book down with a heavy sigh after reading about the experiments that black Americans have been unwittingly subjected to over the years. I cried twice, at events that I can’t talk about without seriously spoiling the book. But it is uplifting too, particularly in a stand-out chapter where Henrietta’s children, Deborah and Zakariyya, visit a cancer researcher to see their mother’s cells under a microscope.

All of this is to be expected of a book that refuses to shy away from tackling important themes – the interplay between science and ethics, the question of who owns our bodies, and the history of racism in the US. And yet for all its grand scope, skilful writing and touching compassion, there is one simple element that makes The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks an instant classic – this is one of those stories that genuinely needed to be told.

Uncovering it was a decade-long labour of love for Skloot and every year of research is apparent in its brisk 300-page length. It’s a tribute to the art of investigative journalism and it sets an incredibly high benchmark for future non-fiction writing. As a young science writer starting out in this field, this book will provide inspiration for years to come.

As a final thought, I was struck by the parallels between Henrietta’s cells and her story. Henrietta’s entire family history was eventually condensed into a small sliver of cells that you could carry in a glass vial. They have achieved immortality, used by scientists throughout the world. Similarly, her entire life has been condensed into a moving tale and an exceptional book that you could read in a comfortable day. By right, it will achieve the same immortal status.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks launches on February 2, 2010 and is currently available to pre-order on Amazon ( UK or US site). I urge you to do so – pre-ordering will help to determine the book’s fate in the first few weeks of sale, when much of its future is set.  

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Review: ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,’ Condensed

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By Neil Genzlinger

• April 20, 2017

One of the most acclaimed nonfiction books of 2010, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” began as an investigation of a medical miracle but became a gripping, poignant story about racism, shoddy scientific ethics and a sprawling family’s painful experiences with both.

If it sounds as if effectively truncating such an intricate, provocative book into a 93-minute movie would be nearly impossible, well, the film version that has its premiere Saturday night on HBO proves the point. This fascinating tale really wanted to be a six- or eight-episode mini-series.

The movie, also titled “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” was directed by George C. Wolfe, who had a starry cast at his disposal headed by Oprah Winfrey and Rose Byrne. It tells a rich and unsettling story that begins with the woman of the title (played in flashbacks by Renée Elise Goldsberry), who died of cancer in 1951 but not before unwittingly making an invaluable contribution to science: cancer cells that reproduced outside the body.

“In this jar, we have a sample of cancerous human tissue,” Dr. George Gey (Reed Birney) explains in a 1950s-style newsreel in the film’s early moments. “What makes this sample so unique is that this is the first cell line we have discovered in over 30 years of trying that can survive and reproduce indefinitely. With this, scientists will be able to perform experiments that they never could on a living human being.”

The cell line (called HeLa, from Lacks’s names) became the basis for a vast amount of medical research, but the movie isn’t about the resulting breakthroughs. It’s about a young author, Rebecca Skloot (Ms. Byrne), who goes in search of the woman behind the cell line and encounters a volatile family, assorted mysteries and all sorts of questions about scientific ethics .

Ms. Skloot of course wrote the book upon which the movie is based, but she is also a character in the story, a white woman intruding on a black family that at first is not inclined to share information about the matriarch or the rest of the clan. The core relationship in the film is the one between Rebecca and Deborah Lacks (Ms. Winfrey, also an executive producer here), one of Henrietta’s daughters, who gradually comes to trust Rebecca and helps her gain access to other family members.

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Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

August 2, 2019 by Bloom Ob/Gyn

There are moments in scientific discovery that are undeniably important in modern medicine and research. Take Andrew Fleming, for example, who mistakenly discovered Penicillin in 1928.  Dr. Fleming returned from a two week vacation to find mold contaminating one of his bacterial culture plates. But he also noticed that this mold prevented the growth of his bacteria – and thus was the advent of Penicillin.  Unlike Fleming’s fairly innocuous discovery, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot captures the story of another major scientific discovery – this one with grave human consequences.   

Published in 2010, this novel tells the story of a mother and poor Southern tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks.  She passed away at a young age and, from the beginning, her doctors knew that there was something unusual about the cancer cells on her cervix.  Henrietta’s cells – Hela cells – were taken without her knowledge and have become one of the most important tools in medicine. In fact, if you Google “HeLa cells,” your search will yield 30,000,000+ hits.  Why is it then that few have heard of their namesake?

HeLa cells are still alive today even though she died nearly seventy years ago.  These cells grow unusually fast, doubling their count in only 24 hours. They are also immortal – meaning they will divide again and again and again without dying off.  This makes them ideal for large scale testing. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovering secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.  Their chromosomes and proteins have been studied with such precision that scientists know their every detail. Like mice, Henrietta’s cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot takes us from the cancer ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells.  From Henrietta’s small hometown in Virginia to East Baltimore in the early 2000s where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her short life and immortal cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until nearly twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. Even though these cells launched a multimillion-dollar industry, her family never saw a portion of the profits. The story of the Lacks family is connected to the history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of ethics in medicine and research, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the course of a decade, Rebecca Skloot carefully researched and uncovered the story of Henrietta Lacks’ immortal cells.  In that process, she becomes entangled in the lives of Henrietta’s family – especially her 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 if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t she afford health insurance?

In her words, Rebecca writes:

“The Lackses challenged everything I thought I knew about faith, science, journalism, and race. Ultimately, this book is the result. It’s not only the story of HeLa cells and Henrietta Lacks, but of Henrietta’s family—particularly Deborah—and their lifelong struggle to make peace with the existence of those cells, and the science that made them possible.”

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is intimate, astonishingly broad in scope, and nearly impossible to put down.

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Book review: ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,’ by Rebecca Skloot

Entertainment Entertainment | Feb 18, 2017

Few people hold the rare distinction of being both famous and unknown at the same time. These characteristics are held by one 20th-century woman who never lived to experience the paradoxical nature of the impact her existence had upon the world of science and medicine.

Born poor in the rural remnants of the Civil War South, Henrietta Lacks died young, the victim of a particularly virulent batch of cancer cells that refused to die as they consumed her body from the inside out. This gripping story is brought to life in Rebecca Skloot’s best-selling book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” which is also the basis for an upcoming HBO movie starring Oprah Winfrey.

More than history

The highly engaging and deeply moving book is more than a history lesson of a forgotten chapter of mid-20th-century science; it is also a tribute to the family at the impenetrable heart of the matter. The author is a pivotal part of the journey to unlock the secrets of the woman behind the “HeLa” cells that have gone on to change the course of modern medical research.

“Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta’s cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse.”Rebecca SklootAuthor “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” @media ( min-width: 1440px ) { .vail-donation-mobile { display: none; } } body.vaildaily .btn:hover { color: white !important; } Support Local Journalism Donate

Skloot inserts herself into the narrative, and rightfully so, as her unrelenting commitment to tell the true tale of Henrietta Lacks went a long way in helping the overlooked and overburdened family find some much-needed recognition and peace.

Skloot first heard mention of the extraordinary nature of the HeLa cells in a high school biology lecture in 1988, and as she matriculated toward a science degree, she learned HeLa was everywhere: literally in every research lab around the world. The cells having contributed to the development of impactful advancements such as the polio vaccine, leaps in modern cancer treatments, helping make Dolly the sheep a reality and bringing hope to families longing for children. “Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta’s cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse,” Skloot writes.

History merges

But even as Skloot acknowledged Lacks’ cells were well-studied, it became clear little to nothing was known about the woman — the black woman — who had unknowingly contributed them. This mysterious lack of information around the marvelous undying cells never quite left Skloot’s mind, and she longed to someday learn the rest of the story, living with the idea of a book on the subject bouncing around in her mind.

Finally, after years of intervening life and failed attempts to learn about the source of the cells, Skloot managed to connect with Deborah Lacks, one of Henrietta Lacks’ children, and the encounter put the two women on a journey of shared discovery and set the stage for their unlikely friendship. Their bond is central to the perspective Skloot brings to the telling of Henrietta Lacks’ story.

The book weaves back and forth in time, spiraling outward from the ground zero moment of Henrietta’s death from cervical cancer, during the treatment of which tumor cells were taken without her consent and knowledge. At the time of her illness in 1951, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore was the last option for most patients like Lacks, thanks to its beginnings as a charity hospital. It was also one of the rare clinics that treated African Americans.

Johns Hopkins was deeply involved in research — partly because of its focus on minorities, most of whom were unable to pay for services rendered. Skloot shines a light on the controversial and disturbing practice which involved sample-taking from unknowing black patients, then viewed by medical staff as a form of reimbursement for medical treatment.

HeLa offspring

Skloot juxtaposes this reality experienced by many minorities against an even more unethical practice that occurred at the Tuskegee Institute in the 1930s, where black men suffering from syphilis were studied as they died painfully and without treatment. There is a bad history within the African American community when it came to medical care, and many are slow to trust, with good reason, Skloot maintains.

As Skloot weaves the stories of Henrietta Lacks and her descendants together, the main point of focus is on this gray area of mistrust and systemic abuse in which the family found itself. As HeLa cells began to multiply exponentially, the original physician who acquired and cultivated the cells sent them out into the world, well aware of the potential good they could contribute.

But once out of his hands, Pandora’s box had been metaphorically opened and subsequent researchers began to grow their own HeLa cell offspring, choosing to sell them for profit and thereby giving rise to some of the large biomedical industries that dominate today’s medical landscape.

a terrible secret

Of all this, most tragically, the Lacks family as unknown until 1973, well more than 20 years after the initial cells had been extracted from Henrietta Lacks. It was only through a passing conversation between one of the family members and an acquaintance who worked for the National Cancer Institute where two and two were put together, connecting HeLa to Henrietta — Lacks, the real human behind the extraordinary immortal cells.

Skloot paints a picture of a family overwhelmed by the terrible secret, as though all the good their mother’s cells did for the world was countered by all the pain and suffering the family has had to endure; with poverty, familial abuse and an ironically persistent lack of health insurance always looming large in their lives.

The details of neglect the family suffered are heart-wrenching, and Skloot does not shy away from the ugly torments they endured. She also gives page time to the glorious phenomenon of Henrietta’s miraculous cells, which have gone out into the world for more than a generation, a spiritual body and an angel according to Deborah, who is bent on doing good, even though good was not done unto her.

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Audio CD – Unabridged, February 2, 2010

• Print length 10 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Random House Audio
• Publication date February 2, 2010
• Dimensions 5.07 x 1.17 x 5.83 inches
• ISBN-10 0307712508
• ISBN-13 978-0307712509
• See all details

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What's it about, amazon editors say....

We named this the #1 Best Book of 2010 - a fascinating and moving portrait of a woman whose name should never be forgotten.

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Editorial Reviews

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Entertainment Weekly #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year New Yorker Reviewers’ Favorite American Library Association Notable Book People Top Ten Book of the Year Washington Post Book World Top Ten Book of the Year Salon.com Best Book of the Year USA Today Ten Books We Loved Reading O, The Oprah Magazine Top Ten Book of the Year National Public Radio Best of the Bestsellers Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of the Year   Financial Times Nonfiction Favorite Los Angeles Times Critics’ Pick Bloomberg Top Nonfiction New York magazine Top Ten Book of the Year Slate.com Favorite Book of the Year TheRoot.com Top Ten Book of the Year Discover magazine 2010 Must-Read Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year Library Journal Top Ten Book of the Year Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year U.S. News & World Report Top Debate-Worthy Book Booklist Top of the List—Best Nonfiction Book New York Times /Science Bestseller list   “I could not put the book down . . . The story of modern medicine and bioethics—and, indeed, race relations—is refracted beautifully, and movingly.” — Entertainment Weekly “Science writing is often just about ‘the facts.’ Skloot’s book, her first, is far deeper, braver, and more wonderful.” —New York Times Book Review “ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a triumph of science writing...one of the best nonfiction books I have ever read.” —Wired.com “ A deftly crafted investigation of a social wrong committed by the medical establishment, as well as the scientific and medical miracles to which it led.” —Washington Post “ Riveting...a tour-de-force debut.” —Chicago Sun-Times “A real-life detective story, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks probes deeply into racial and ethical issues in medicine . . . The emotional impact of Skloot’s tale is intensified by its skillfully orchestrated counterpoint between two worlds.” — Nature “A jaw-dropping true story . . . raises urgent questions about race and research for ‘progress’ . . . an inspiring tale for all ages.” — Essence “This extraordinary account shows us that miracle workers, believers, and con artists populate hospitals as well as churches, and that even a science writer may find herself playing a central role in someone else’s mythology.” — The New Yorker    “Has the epic scope of Greek drama, and a corresponding inability to be easily explained away.” — SF Weekly   “One of the great medical biographies of our time.” — The Financial Times    “Like any good scientific research, this beautifully crafted and painstakingly researched book raises nearly as many questions as it answers . . . In a time when it’s fashionable to demonize scientists, Skloot generously does not pin any sins to the lapels of the researchers. She just lets them be human . . . [and] challenges much of what we believe of ethics, tissue ownership, and humanity.” — Science    “Indelible . . . The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a heroic work of cultural and medical journalism.” —Laura Miller, Salon.com    “No dead woman has done more for the living . . . a fascinating, harrowing, necessary book.” —Hilary Mantel, The Guardian (U.K.)   “ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks does more than one book ought to be able to do.” — Dallas Morning News “Above all it is a human story of redemption for a family, torn by loss, and for a writer with a vision that would not let go.” — Boston Globe  “This remarkable story of how the cervical cells of the late Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman, enabled subsequent discoveries from the polio vaccine to in vitro fertilization is extraordinary in itself; the added portrayal of Lacks's full life makes the story come alive with her humanity and the palpable relationship between race, science, and exploitation." —Paula J. Giddings, author of Ida, A Sword Among Lions ; Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 Professor, Afro-American Studies, Smith College    “Skloot’s engaging, suspenseful book is an incredibly welcome addition for non-science wonks.” — Newsweek “Extraordinary . . . If science has exploited Henrietta Lacks [Skloot] is determined not to. This biography ensures that she will never again be reduced to cells in a petri dish: she will always be Henrietta as well as HeLa.” — The Telegraph (U.K.)   “Brings the Lacks family alive . . . gives Henrietta Lacks another kind of immortality—this one through the discipline of good writing.” — Baltimore Sun “A work of both heart and mind, driven by the author’s passion for the story, which is as endlessly renewable as HeLa cells.” — Los Angeles Times   “In this gripping, vibrant book, Rebecca Skloot looks beyond the scientific marvels to explore the ethical issues behind a discovery that may have saved your life.” — Mother Jones   “More than ten years in the making, it feels like the book Ms. Skloot was born to write . . . Skloot, a young science journalist and an indefatigable researcher, writes about Henrietta Lacks and her impact on modern medicine from almost every conceivable angle and manages to make all of them fascinating . . . a searching moral inquiry into greed and blinkered lives . . . packed with memorable characters.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times , Top Ten Book of 2010   “Astonishing . . .No matter how much you may know about basic biology, you will be amazed by this book." — The Journal of Clinical Investigation “Rebecca Skloot did her job, and she did it expertly . . . A riveting narrative that is wholly original.” —THEROOT.COM   “Moving . . .” — The Economist   “Journalist Rebecca Skloot’s history of the miraculous cells reveals deep injustices in U.S. medical research.” — TIME   “ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a fascinating look at the woman whose cultured cells—the first to grow and survive indefinitely, harvested without compensation or consent—have become essential to modern medicine.” — Vogue   “ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a remarkable feat of investigative journalism and a moving work of narrative nonfiction that reads with the vividness and urgency of fiction. It also raises sometimes uncomfortable questions with no clear-cut answers about whether people should be remunerated for their physical, genetic contributions to research and about the role of profit in science.” — National Public Radio   “An indelible, marvelous story as powerful as those cells.” — Philadelphia Inquirer   “As much an act of justice as one of journalism.” — Seattle Times   “A stunning book . . . surely the definitive work on the subject.” — The Independent (U.K.)   “Graceful . . . I can’t think of a better way to capture the corrosive effects of ethical transgressions in medical research. It’s a heartbreaking story, beautifully rendered.” — The Lancet   “Read this . . . By letting the Lackses be people, and by putting them in the center of the history, Skloot turns just another tale about the march of progress into a complicated portrait of the interaction between science and human lives. —BOINGBOING.NET   “[A] remarkable and moving book . . . a vivid portrait of Lacks that should be as abiding as her cells.” — The Times  (U.K.)   “I can’t imagine a better tale. A detective story that’s at once mythically large and painfully intimate. I highly recommend this book.” —Jad Abumrad, Radiolab   “Skloot is a terrific popularizer of medical science, guiding readers through this dense material with a light and entertaining touch.” — The Globe and Mail  (Canada)   “A rare and powerful combination of race, class, gender,medicine, bioethics, and intellectual property; far more rare is the writer that can so clearly fuse those disparate threads into a personal story so rich and compelling.” — Seed   “Powerful story . . . I feel moved even to say on behalf of the thousands of anonymous black men and women who’ve been experimented on for medical purposes, thank you. Thank you for writing this important book.” —Kali-AhsetAmen,  Radio Diaspora   “Skloot has written an important work of immersive nonfiction that brings not only the stories of Henrietta Lacks and HeLa once more into line, but also catharsis to a family in sore need of it.” — The Times Literary Supplement   “A masterful work of nonfiction . . . a real page turner.” —Hanna Rosin, Slate   “Skloot explores human consequences of the intersection of science and business, rescuing one of modern medicine’s inadvertent pioneers from an unmarked grave.” — US News & World Report   “Remarkably balanced and nonjudgmental . . . The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks will leave readers reeling, plain and simple. It has a power and resonance rarely found in any genre, and is a subject that touches each of us, whether or not we are aware of our connection to Henrietta’s gift.” — The Oregonian   “This is the perfect book. It reads like a novel but has the intellectual substance of a science textbook or a historical biography.” — The Daily Nebraskan   “Illuminates what happens when medical research is conducted within an unequal health-care system and delivers an American narrative fraught with intrigue, tragedy, triumph, pathos, and redemption.” — MS. “ A tremendous accomplishment —a tale of important science history that reads like a terrific novel.” — Kansas City Star   “Good science writing isn’t easy, but Skloot makes it appear so.” —The Wichita Eagle   “Encompasses nearly every hot-button issue currently surrounding the practice of medicine.” — Madison Capital Times   “Defies easy categorization . . . as unpredictable as any pulp mystery and as strange as any science fiction.” — Willamette Week   “An achievement . . . navigates both the technical and deeply personal sides of the HeLa story with clarity and care.” — The Portland Mercury   “[A] remarkable book.” — London Review of Books     “An essential reminder that all human cells grown in labs across the world, HeLa or otherwise, came from individuals with fears, desires, and stories to tell.” — Chemical & Engineering News    “Blows away the notion that science writing must be the literary equivalent to Ambien.” — Chicago Tribune   “Seldom do you read a book that is science, social history, and a page turner.” —British Medical Journal   “Thrilling and original nonfiction that refuses to be shoehorned into anything as trivial as a genre. It is equal parts popular science, historical biography, and detective novel.” —Ed Yong, DISCOVER.COM   “Best book I’ve read in years.” —Brian Sullivan, Fox Business Network   “Thanks to Rebecca Skloot, we may now remember Henrietta—who she was, how she lived, how she died.” — The New Republic   “We need more writers like Rebecca Skloot.” —E.O.Wilson

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Audio; Unabridged edition (February 2, 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Audio CD ‏ : ‎ 10 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307712508
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307712509
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.07 x 1.17 x 5.83 inches
• #1,046 in Medical Research (Books)
• #4,760 in Scientist Biographies
• #7,876 in Black & African American Biographies

About the author

Rebecca skloot.

Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning science writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; and others. She has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s Radiolab and PBS’s NOVA scienceNOW, and is a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine and guest editor of The Best American Science Writing 2011. She is a former Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle and has taught creative nonfiction and science journalism at the University of Memphis, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University. Her debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, took more than ten years to research and write, and became an instant New York Times bestseller. She has been featured on numerous television shows, including CBS Sunday Morning and The Colbert Report. Her book has received widespread critical acclaim, with reviews appearing in The New Yorker, Washington Post, Science, Entertainment Weekly, People, and many others. It won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and was named The Best Book of 2010 by Amazon.com, and a Best Book of the Year by Entertainment Weekly; O, The Oprah Magazine; The New York Times; Washington Post; US News & World Report; and numerous others.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is being translated into more than twenty languages, and adapted into a young adult book, and an HBO film produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball. Skloot lives in Chicago but regularly abandons city life to write in the hills of West Virginia, where she tends to find stray animals and bring them home. She travels extensively to speak about her book. For more information, visit RebeccaSkloot.com, where you will find book special features, including photos and videos, as well as her book tour schedule, and links to follow her and The Immortal Life on Twitter and Facebook.

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Customers find the emotional tone heartbreaking, funny, and moving. They also describe the characterization as understanding and bringing to life the human characters. Readers find the content highly informative, educational, and charged with emotion. They describe the readability as easy to read, descriptive when required, and impossible to put down. They mention the values as compelling, thought-provoking, and nonjudgmental. Reader opinions are mixed on the entertainment value, with some finding it fascinating and engaging, while others say it's boring at times.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book highly informative, educational, and exceptional on many levels. They say the author narrates the science lucidly, tracks the racial politics of medicine thoughtfully, and creates a sense of people and places. They also say it's an important contribution to American history and gives them much to ponder. Readers also mention that the book has overlapping genres and is emotionally charged.

"...It was also more human and less persuasive than a newspaper article ...." Read more

"...It lived up to, and even exceeded, my expectations. It answered all my questions , and brought up many new ones, the answers to some of which may..." Read more

"...to biomedical research using human tissues is both effective and persuasive . The book is well-referenced and has been intensely fact-checked...." Read more

" This book is important . Especially for anyone in the medical field. I have heard about it for years, but reading it has shocked me to my core...." Read more

Customers find the book easy to understand, concise, and descriptive when description is required. They also say the story flows well and keeps them interested. Readers also mention that it's easy to concoct conspiracy theories and cherry pick events to support them.

"...alone is amazing, the author made it even better by making the book easy to understand , exploring the ethics of the doctor patient relationship, and..." Read more

"...The story is well written and flowed well keeping me interested despite my having zero interest in cell biology...." Read more

"...I was amazed at the depth of research in the book, the beauty and simplicity of the writing , and the importance of the subject...." Read more

"...Skloot does a great job explaining everything from the basic structure of a cell, to replication, and sample contamination...." Read more

Customers find the book provides food for thought with ethics, morality, research, and touching compassion. They also say it provides a wonderful human entry into a difficult and fascinating world. Readers also say the book is riveting, heartbreaking, and nonjudgmental.

"...Overall the books way of being empathetic , easy to understand, and tackling the moral and ethical nuances of the medical practice is what made it..." Read more

"...the embodiment of an investigative journalist; probing, indefatigable, brave . She is also a talented writer, but there is more than that about her...." Read more

"...Besides being educational, it raises some great ethical questions (which is why so many book clubs have read it)." Read more

"...the mistrust and misinformation she dealt with, but Skloot remains utterly non-judgmental ...." Read more

Customers find the emotional tone of the book amazing, heartbreaking, horrifying, and inspiring. They also say it's well written, and reads at times like a medical thriller. Readers also mention that the book has funny and moving moments. They appreciate the thoughtful and judicious voice.

"...That tiny moment said represented was so beautifully tragic and added a whole new level to the book...." Read more

"...Skloot's tone is straightforward but dimpled with humor and wit . Her research efforts must be applauded as well...." Read more

"...I was angry, intrigued, heartbroken , and in awe throughout the story. This was a page turner...." Read more

"...It was riveting, emotional and gives me so much to think about for my own medical decisions going forward...." Read more

Customers find the book well worth the price. They also say the author wrote a wonderful account of a woman's life.

"...society longer lives and improved health; and it has reduced the cost of illness ...." Read more

"...this is not an easy book to read, but I believe that it is well worth the effort ." Read more

"This was greatly priced compared to school pricing. I needed this for a class and was brand new for good price. Also, it was a good book to read :)!" Read more

"...mystery and a good story about an unsung heroine, this book is worth checking out ." Read more

Customers find the characterization in the book well-written and personalizes the story of Henrietta. They also say the voices in the audiobook make it alive. Customers also mention that the daughter Deborah is fascinating and unique.

"...addition Skloot provides lively and engaging narrative, full of interesting personalities , that results from her extensive research on the use of..." Read more

"...This is a sad book with tragic circumstances but the characters are real and so the impact of the story is profound...." Read more

"... Her cells were unique and amazing because they quickly grew in a lab and unlike other cells, if cared for, they never died...." Read more

"...The characters are all realistic and actually lived or are still living today...." Read more

Customers find the pacing very moving, engaging, and poignant. They say the story keeps them drawn to it and allows them to feel the process it took to compile it. Readers also say the journey is amazing, heartbreaking, and interesting. They mention the book is more detailed than the movie.

"...In addition Skloot provides lively and engaging narrative, full of interesting personalities, that results from her extensive research on the use..." Read more

"...The authour captured the time and feelings very well . I could not put the book down!..." Read more

"...it almost seemed the writing style changed; became choppy, and dragged on ...." Read more

"...culture was really interesting, and Henrietta's personal struggle was moving and very sad...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the entertainment value of the book. Some find it fascinating, engaging, and full of drama, while others say it's boring at times, overdone, and horrifying.

"...like very dry subject matter, I found the book compelling and entertaining and I could not put it down...." Read more

"...but I found it difficult at times to build a rapport with this loud, obnoxious and dysfunctional family...." Read more

"...as told by Ms. Skloot and Deborah, so overwhelming, tragic, and exciting that I talk to all of our doctors about her!..." Read more

"...Some of this period of history is not pretty at all. In fact, it is horrifying ...." Read more

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4301 W Brown Deer Rd, Brown Deer, WI 53223

Brown Deer Library Staff Blog

• Jan 18, 2022

Book Club Discussion Questions: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Updated: Mar 24, 2022

For those of you that haven't or couldn't attend book club lately, we'll be publishing the previous months' discussion questions here. I hope eventually to post discussion questions for all of the books we've covered since I took over a couple of years ago and beyond, all the way to the beginning over a decade and a half ago. It will take a while. Until then, we will be posting discussion questions on a weekly basis. Here are the questions from a 2012 title, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. We hope these questions spark discussions of your own.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The story of modern medicine and bioethics—and, indeed, race relations—is refracted beautifully, and movingly.”— Entertainment Weekly

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE • ONE OF THE “MOST INFLUENTIAL” (CNN), “DEFINING” ( LITHUB ), AND “BEST” ( THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER ) BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF ESSENCE ’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS • WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NONFICTION

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Entertainment Weekly • O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • Financial Times • New York • Independent (U.K.) • Times (U.K.) • Publishers Weekly • Library Journal • Kirkus Reviews • Booklist • Globe and Mail

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.

Discussion Questions

Start by unraveling the complicated history of Henrietta Lacks's tissue cells. Who did what with the cells, when, where and for what purpose? Who benefited, scientifically, medically, and monetarily?

What are the specific issues raised in the book—legally and ethically? Talk about the 1980s John Moore case: the appeal court decision and its reversal by the California Supreme Court.

Follow-up to Question #2 : Should patient consent be required to store and distribute their tissue for research? Should doctors disclose their financial interests? Would this make any difference in achieving fairness? Or is this not a matter of fairness or an ethical issue to begin with?

Was it important for the author to use the voices of the people she interviewed . . . using dialect/language to portray those voices?

Did that technique, using people’s words and voices to recall events, make the book more readable? More believable? Could you see it done a different way?

What are the legal ramifications regarding payment for tissue samples? Consider the the RAND corporation estimation that 304 million tissue samples, from 178 million are people, are held by labs.

What are the spiritual and religious issues surrounding the living tissue of people who have died? How do Henrietta's descendants deal with her continued "presence" in the world...and even the cosmos (in space)?

What were some of the big issues in this book for you? Ethics. . . Do your body parts belong to you once they are taken out? Fairness . . . is life fair? Discrimination . . . do you think Henrietta got the same care as a poor white woman? A well off any color woman? Faith . . . poverty, patient privacy . . .

Were you bothered when researcher Robert Stevenson tells author Skloot that "scientists don’t like to think of HeLa cells as being little bits of Henrietta because it’s much easier to do science when you dissociate your materials from the people they come from"? Is that an ugly outfall of scientific research...or is it normal, perhaps necessary, for a scientist to distance him/herself? If "yes" to the last part of that question, what about research on animals...especially for research on cosmetics?

How did she do explaining the science of cells and their use to the reader? Did the author recreate Henrietta for you? What sort of person was she?

When the author was warned about how to act around Deborah . . . p. 51 . . . what kind of person were you expecting? When you read that first phone conversation with Deborah, what did you think then? What sort of person was Deborah? As you read more of her story, how did you feel about her?

What do you think of the incident in which Henrietta's children "see" their mother in the Johns Hopkins lab? How would you have felt? Would you have sensed a spiritual connection to the life that once created those cells...or is the idea of cells simply too remote to relate to?

How would you characterize the Lacks family? Why do you think they felt the way they did about their mother and her cells?

What did you think of daughter Deborah’s thinking about how her mother did so much for medicine and the children of HeLa couldn’t afford to go to a doctor?

Is race an issue in this story? Would things have been different had Henrietta been a middle class white woman rather than a poor African American woman? Consider both the taking of the cell sample without her knowledge, let alone consent... and the questions it is raising 60 years later when society is more open about racial injustice?

Why did Henrietta keep her cancer a secret? Do you think the doctors missed the tumor during the birth of her last baby? Or did it grow that quickly?

After her treatments, things looked positive for Henrietta, but things quickly turned south. Again, do you think her doctors were neglectful or could it have had something to do with the way her cells survived in the laboratory?

What did you think of the communication between Henrietta and her doctors . . . It appeared that she didn’t know that she would become barren or that the final treatments were merely to alleviate pain . . . What do you think was missing there?

In your opinion, what was the most appalling treatment of the Lacks family by medical personnel over the years?

What’s your opinion on researcher Gey visiting Henrietta . . . Do you think he did? On p. 103 it shows that Gey was unhappy about the way other scientists were using HeLa cells . . . did it seem as though he thought they belonged to him? Did they?

Did the good that Henrietta’s cells did for the world, from health to economic to scientific breakthroughs, make up for the way she was treated?

Do you think Henrietta would have given consent to let her cells be used?

Why were the scientists upset when the cells were traced back to Henrietta?

What were the differences between the other cell donors that the author talked about? Should people be able to profit from their own cells? Should doctors or corporations?

There was much in the early part of the book about how the family never knew about Henrietta’s cells . . . If you were in their shoes, would it be important to you? What would you want to know . . . would you want financial compensation? Would you feel a sense of violation when you did find out?

Do you think this book makes a case for universal health care?

Have doctor/patient relationships changed over the years? Do we still treat them as all knowing, all powerful people? Do you think poor people are still treated differently?

How much did you know about people being used as research subjects, with or without their consent . . . Do you think it still goes on today? Do you read all the papers you sign at the doctors?

On p. 130, there is discussion on testing on humans by a doctor injecting people with cancer cells. Some were prisoners, some ob/gyn patients... what did you think of his attitude?

Author Rebecca Skloot is a veteran science writer. Did you find it enjoyable to follow her through the ins-and-outs of the laboratory and scientific research? Or was this a little too "petri-dishish" for you?

Which part was more interesting to you . . . The story of Henrietta or of her cells?

How much science did you learn? Was it important to the story that information about cells and their biology was incorporated into the book?

Why do you think the author was so determined to write this book . . . why didn’t she get discouraged with the so many brick walls she ran into?

How do you think Henrietta’s family reacted to the Skloot’s book? Would they have been pleased with her portrayal?

Why was it important to Deborah for her mother to be as famous as her cells were? Do you think she finally is?

Do you agree with the Lacks’ family desire to be compensated for Henrietta’s cells? Or for participating in the book? Did the author have any responsibility to do so? Does any author?

What do you think the author had in mind to accomplish with this book? Did she? Did she help make the life of the Lacks family any better?

What did you learn from reading The Immortal Life ? What surprised you the most? What disturbed you the most?

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Suggestions, book review: the immortal life of henrietta lacks.

H ow have I never heard of Henrietta Lacks before? This book should be required reading before applying to medical school. Understanding Henrietta Lacks’ story and her immortal cells is important for all doctors and scientists. Henrietta’s cells have facilitated the research into the association of HPV and cervical cancer, the HPV vaccine, the polio vaccine, countless cancer treatments and allowed cosmetics to be tested without using animals… but I knew none of that before I read the book.

Rebecca Skloot is an American science writer who became fascinated by Henrietta Lacks’ life at age 16. Skloot first heard about her in a biology lesson 37 years after Henrietta Lacks had died. This book documents Skloot’s journey to discover how the cells from Henrietta’s fatal cervical cancer came to be so significant within medical research. She met with Henrietta’s family, reviewed her medical records, visited the places that she had lived and interviewed doctors and researchers. The book is an engaging human story of the people involved but also explains the history of ethics and research, and racism within medicine.

The book is an engaging human story of the people involved but also explains the history of ethics and research, and racism within medicine.

The book begins with a quote from Deborah (Henrietta’s daughter) including: “…if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors?” You won’t be surprised to learn that Henrietta Lacks was black and grew up in a fragmented and deprived family. She was born in 1920 in Virginia, in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, and died in 1951 from an aggressive cervical cancer. Her cancer cells were the first to be successfully grown in a lab and are still used to this day, often referred to as HeLa cells. Neither she nor her family gave consent for her cells to be replicated and sold for research, however not seeking consent was the ethical standard of the time.

Debora, who was just 1 when her mother died, had lived in fear of dying at a young age, as her mother did. She was not scientifically literate and worried constantly that the experiments on the HeLa cells could be causing physical harm and pain to her mother, even though her body was dead. Rebecca Skloot became close friends with Deborah along the journey of researching and writing the book. Deborah has had a difficult life and her lack of explanation about the HeLa cells has compounded her distress.

Skloot tells the very human story of Margaret and George Gey, the researchers who managed to grow the HeLa cells in a laboratory. They were passionate about finding a cure for cancer and worked tirelessly to be the first people to grow a cell line outside of the body. They would take samples from any operations performed by the surgeons working at the charitable hospital (John Hopkins in Baltimore) that Henrietta was treated at. Once they were able to grow the cells, they provided them to other researchers for no profit, though other people / companies did profit from the cells after the Geys lost control over them.

In the 1970s, some researchers contacted the Lacks family in order to ask for blood samples so they could analyse their genetics. There was poor documentation, but it is unlikely they gave fully informed consent. The Nuremberg Code, a 10-point code of ethics for human experimentation across the world, had been introduced in 1947 in response to the atrocities performed on Jewish people by Nazi doctors. This wasn’t a law but was guidance that recommended informed consent. However there were new federal laws mandating a need for informed consent introduced at the time of the genetics tests on Henrietta’s family.

Knowing about this has helped me understand the lack of trust for the predominantly white medical profession by non-white patients, which undoubtedly still has an effect today.

Skloot describes various acts of racism and abuse within medicine that I was unaware of, such as the Tuskegee trial in the 1930s when African-American men with syphilis were studied without any treatment (though treatment was available) to understand the course of syphilis. Many people also suspected that those men may even have been infected deliberately. Another example if the case of the Mississippi appendectomies (unnecessary hysterectomies) on black women to stop them having more children. Knowing about this has helped me understand the lack of trust for the predominantly white medical profession by non-white patients, which undoubtedly still has an effect today.

The book is emotive and hard going, but it is incredibly important to understand how medicine got to where it is today. It is hard not to feel deep compassion for Henrietta Lacks and her family amongst this incredible story.

Featured book: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, Macmillan(2010), 418 pages, ISBN: 978-0-330-53344-7 RRP £9.99 (paperback)

Featured photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

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Remembering Dr. Roland Pattillo and his quest to honor the memory of Henrietta Lacks

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

For more than a quarter century, the Morehouse School of Medicine has held a conference named for Henrietta Lacks. She was a young Black mother who died in 1951 and whose cells were harvested without permission. Her story was told in the book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." But a lesser-known figure in that history is a Black oncologist who was pivotal in bringing Lacks' contribution to light. NPR's Walter Ray Watson has this remembrance.

WALTER RAY WATSON, BYLINE: Before there was a bestselling book, a movie or conferences, there was Dr. Roland Pattillo.

REBECCA SKLOOT: He was the first person to utter the phrase, thank you, Henrietta.

WATSON: That's Rebecca Skloot, author of "The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks."

SKLOOT: And he was also the first person to ever say I'm sorry for your suffering to members of her family. He was the first person to recognize that they were suffering.

WATSON: Since the 1960s, Dr. Pattillo treated patients and worked in labs. George Gey mentored him at Johns Hopkins. Gey was the biologist who cultivated Lacks' cells in 1951. From Gey, Pattillo learned deeply about HeLa, the first successful human cell line to grow outside the body. Pattillo became a kind of gatekeeper to the Lacks family. When Rebecca Skloot reached him about writing her book...

SKLOOT: I thought I was writing a book about Henrietta and the cells.

WATSON: He grilled the writer. Over several phone calls, they talked about health disparities, race in America and what the Lacks family had endured. She got homework. Once cleared to meet the daughter, Deborah, Skloot geared up to write a far more complicated story, largely because of Pattillo. The book was a bestseller in 2010. An HBO movie in 2017 starred Oprah Winfrey as Deborah Lacks and Rose Byrne as Rebecca Skloot.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS")

ROSE BYRNE: (As Rebecca Skloot) When I finish it, do you want me to send it to you, or do you want me to come down and read it?

OPRAH WINFREY: (As Deborah Lacks) Only certain parts. I've been thinking about going back to school.

DANIEL FORD: Dr. Pattillo has really kept the story of the Henrietta Lacks HeLa cell alive.

WATSON: Dr. Daniel Ford runs the Institute of Clinical and Translational Research at Johns Hopkins. After learning about the book's release, they launched the Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture Series. It was an opportunity for outreach, they took it. The Lacks family was welcomed, scholarships awarded. Rebecca Skloot was guest speaker. And Ford invited Dr. Roland Pattillo as well.

FORD: I really struck up a long-term friendship with him. He has come to every symposium he could until COVID made us virtual, and even then, he participated.

WATSON: Roland Pattillo started a forum in honor of Lacks many years before Hopkins. The HeLa Women's Health Symposium at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta was likely the first to raise awareness of the Lacks story and spotlight research and health disparities. It turned 25 last year. Dr. Cheryl Franklin is an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Morehouse School.

CHERYL FRANKLIN: He was just a gentle giant in the truest sense of those words.

WATSON: Franklin, like many of her colleagues, remembers Pattillo as a mentor whose empathy was always on display with patients, faculty and students. HeLa cells are instrumental in the development of countless medical breakthroughs, from a vaccine for polio to, most recently, playing a role fighting COVID-19. Dr. Pattillo pushed for gratitude for Lacks, but he did more. Pat O'Flynn Pattillo was married to her husband for 27 years. Speaking from her suburban Atlanta home, she says he worked with the HeLa cell line but started two more in his career.

PAT O'FLYNN PATTILLO: Dr. Pattillo always talked about his JAR - J-A-R - cell line and also his Ca Ski cell line.

WATSON: The Ca Ski cell line, like the HeLa cell line, contributed to the human papillomavirus vaccine in use today. Pat Pattillo marvels at all that he did, and recalls her husband's struggle with the illness that claimed his life last May at 89.

O'FLYNN PATTILLO: I think only as I have seen him with Parkinson's and seeing him locked in the disease when his mind was still so clear and so brilliant and so ready still to work.

WATSON: Last week, the 26th annual HeLa Symposium was held in Atlanta...

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Behind every person is someone else pushing them along.

WATSON: ...The first without Dr. Roland Pattillo.

Walter Ray Watson, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Still Not Enough: Family of Henrietta Lacks Receives Juneteenth Award Amid Ongoing Fight for Justice

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Immortal life of henrietta lacks

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Hardcover, 2010)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Paperback, 2011)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Hardcover, 2011)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Audiobook, CD, 2010)

Summary and Analysis of the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Paperback, 2017)