Pretty early on, when I was struggling with this, I knew this wonderful fiction writer named Albert French who lived right around the corner from me in Pittsburgh. I would talk to him about the story as I was figuring it out. He just kept repeating that. I realized I had to figure out why they were so resistant to me and that doing so would lead me to the real story.
Which it did. The Home House side door. I wanted to be able to revisit that height, the door, everything about it. Plus things started happening between me and Deborah that were not your usual writer-subject things, like her slamming me against a wall … like faith healings and something that resembled an exorcism. This is part of the story. Even Deborah started harping on me. Without realizing it, I had actually become a character in their story.
Like it or not. She came very near a stroke at one point because of information we found together about her sister. I tell the story of all the other journalists who came along before me and the impact they had on the family. I also felt like I needed to include that story as a form of disclosure, so people could understand the relationship I developed with Deborah.
The story is sort of out of control. A foundation corner of the Home House. This photo helped Skloot document building materials and construction of the house, which was propped up with stones high off the ground.
She took many photos of the Home House, from different angles and at different times of year. I think that was the moment that this image crystallized for me: of this young writer, not the one writing the book but the younger writer researching the book in the book, skating ever further out over ever deeper water covered by increasingly thin ice—and miraculously never falling through.
Sometimes you could hear the ice crack. Did you mean to be one Rebecca writing about another Rebecca? Or did that sort of happen? Throughout the book I was learning how to be a reporter and how to write. I started fresh from an undergraduate biology degree with no real training in journalism and no clue about how to do any of this. My notes from my first trip to Turner Station were horrible.
You moron! What were you doing? The thing that saved me was that I took compulsive amounts of photographs. I photographed everything—every room that I was in, every person I talked to, every street that I was on, the sky to capture the weather, you name it. Not trusting that she was yet an expert at documenting surroundings in her notes, Skloot took this photo to document the sky and weather as she drove to Turner Station.
But I also re-reported many of them. Why are you asking me these questions? In case she later decided to mention that there were wildflowers growing outside the abandoned building that might become the Henrietta Lacks Museum, Skloot photographed wildflowers growing nearby. She planned to have a botanist identify the species of flower if she described them. Writing the first-person stuff was hard, partly because I was resistant but also because it involved this weird battle with my younger, inexperienced self.
People often ask if I wish that this book had taken less time. I needed all that time to really understand the story and how it all fit together.
Your enmeshment within the family kind of goes against a journalistic idea about involvement and distance from subjects and so on. So no matter how close and enmeshed I got with the Lacks family, there was never any question that I was a reporter. A reporter. It is, in essence, refuse, and one woman's trash is another man's treasure.
Ethically, almost all the professional guidelines encourage researchers to obtain consent, but they have no teeth and most were non-existent in anyway. In reality, the vast majority of the tissue taken from patients is of limited use.
But there are those rare times when a single person's cells have the potential to break open the worlds of science and medicine, to the benefit of millions--and the enrichment of a very few. Such was the case with the cells of cervical cancer taken from Henrietta Lacks at Johns Hopkins University hospital. HeLa cells grew in the lab of George Gey. And grew.
And grew, unlike any cell before it. Next, they were carried to a different laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, where Jonas Salk used them to successfully test his polio vaccine, and thus the cancer that had killed Henrietta Lacks directly led to the healing of millions worldwide.
Soon HeLa cells would be in almost every major research laboratory in the world. They traveled to Asia to help find a cure for hemorrhagic fever and into space to study the effects of zero gravity on human cells. Even today, almost 60 years after Henrietta's death, HeLa cells are some of the most widely used by the scientific community. With such immeasurable benefits as these, who could possibly doubt the wisdom of Henrietta's doctor to take a tiny bit of tissue?
But the "real" story is much more complicated. Henrietta Lacks was uneducated, poor and black. Her cancer was treated in the "colored" ward of Johns Hopkins. Her death left five children without their mother, to be raised by an abusive cousin. Should any of that matter in weighing the morality of taking tissue from a patient without her consent, especially in light of the benefits? God knows our country's history of medical experimentation on the poor and minority populations is not pretty.
Ironically, one of the laboratories researching with HeLa cells in the s was the one at the Tuskegee Institute--at the very same time that the infamous syphilis studies were taking place. In light of that history, Henrietta's race and socioeconomic status can't help but be relevant factors in her particular case. But her children's status? What bearing does that have? According to author Rebecca Skloot, in ethical discussions of the use of human tissue, "[t]here are, essentially, two issues to deal with: consent and money.
The family didn't learn until that their mother's cells had been taken, or that they'd played such a vital role in the development of scientific knowledge. They spent the next 30 years trying to learn more about their mother's cells.
As they learned of the money made by the pharmaceutical companies and other companies as a direct result of HeLa cells, they inevitably asked questions about what share, if any, they were entitled to.
As Henrietta's eldest son put it, "If our mother so important to science, why can't we get health insurance? They want the woman behind her contributions acknowledged for who she is--a black woman, a mother, a person with name longer than four letters.
And they want to know the mother they never knew, to find out the facts of her death. In the lab at Johns Hopkins, looking through a microscope at her mother's cells for the first time, daughter Deborah sums it up: "John Hopkin [sic] is a school for learning, and that's important. But this is my mother. Nobody seem to get that.
Would her decision either way have had any affect whatsoever on her children's future lives? We'll never know, of course. But reading the story behind the case study makes these questions far more potent than any ethics textbook can. And as science now unravels the strains of our DNA--thanks in no small part to HeLa--these are no longer inconsequential questions for any of us.
Perhaps we, too, like the doctors and scientists who have long studied HeLa, can learn from the case study of Henrietta Lacks. View all 8 comments. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is an extraordinary book. By turns it is shocking, informative and tragic. There is brilliance - but also deep injustice.
It is in part an account of the development of genetics, part social commentary, and partly the story of one woman, Henrietta Lacks. She was an African-American woman descended from slaves and one white slave-owner Lacks , and she lived as many hundreds of black people still did even as late as the 's, in poverty in an old slave-cabin The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is an extraordinary book.
She was an African-American woman descended from slaves and one white slave-owner Lacks , and she lived as many hundreds of black people still did even as late as the 's, in poverty in an old slave-cabin - the "home-house" - in East Baltimore. And although the events do not always make for easy reading, the author assures us that it is completely non-fiction.
Nothing has been invented, nothing exaggerated. The author has done her level best to tell things as they were. Although the name "Henrietta Lacks" is comparatively unknown, "HeLa" cells are routinely used in scientific experiments worldwide today, and have been for decades.
They are the only human cells thought to be scientifically "immortal" ie if they are provided with the correct culture and environment they do not die. They were cut from a tumour in the cervix of Henrietta Lacks a few months before she died in ; extracted because she had a particular virulent form of cancer. Despite extreme measures taken in the laboratories to protect the cells, human cells had always inevitably died after a few days.
HeLa cells though, stayed alive in the petri dish, and proved to be virtually unstoppable, growing faster and stronger than any other cells known. These HeLa cells were used to develop the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilisation and a host of other medical treatments.
They were sent on the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity. It is fair to say that they have helped with some of the most important advances in medicine. But there is a terrible irony and injustice in this. The people to benefit from this were largely white people. Henrietta Lacks's family and descendants suffered appalling poverty. Working from dawn to dusk in poisonous tobacco fields was the norm as soon as the children were able to stand.
Moving from Virginia's tobacco production to Bethlehem Steel, a boiler manufacturer in South Boston, was little better, as they were then exposed to asbestos and coal.
The families had intermingled for generations. Henrietta and Day, her husband, were first cousins, and this was by no means unusual. So the predisposition to illness was both hereditary and environmental. But access to medical help was virtually nil.
Most hospitals accepted only whites, or grudgingly admitted so-called "colored" people to a separate area, which was far less well funded and staffed. The Lacks family had to travel a long way in order to be treated, and then were not allowed the privilege of proper explanations as to the treatment given - or the tissue samples extracted. At this time unusual cells were taken routinely by doctors wanting to make their own investigations into cancer which at that time was thought to be a virus and many other conditions.
No permission was sought; none was needed. The Hippocratic oath doctors set such store by dates from the 4th Century BC, and makes no mention of it; neither did the law of the time require it. It was not until , that the subject was raised. Nazi doctors had performed many ethically unsound operations and experiments on live Jews, and during the trials after the war the Nuremberg Code - a 10 point code of ethics - was set up.
This states that, "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. Rebecca Skloot says that Howard Jones, the doctor who had originally diagnosed Henrietta Lacks' cancer, said, "Hopkins, with its large indigent black population, had no dearth of clinical material.
In fact to be fair, the white doctors had no real conception that what they were doing had an ethical side. George Gey and his assistants were responsible for isolating the genetic material in Henrietta's cells - an astonishing feat.
Gey happily shared the cells with any scientists who asked. The issue of payment was never raised, but the HeLa cells fast became a commodity, and the Lacks's family, who were never consulted about anything, mistakenly assumed until very recently that Gey must have made a fortune out of them.
As Henrietta's daughter Deborah said, "Them white folks getting rich of our mother while we got nothin. The reader infers from her examples that testing on the impoverished and disadvantaged was almost routine. One notorious study was into syphilis and apparently went on for 40 years. It was called the "Tuskegee study" , and involved thousands of males at varying stages of the disease. At the time it was known that they could be cured by penicillin, but they were not given this treatment, in order that doctors could study the progress of the disease.
There are many such poignant examples. The author also says that in thousands of chronically ill elderly people, convicts and even some children, were injected by a Dr. Chester Southam with HeLa cells, basically just to see what would happen. Of course many of them went on to develop cancer. One man who had Hela cells injected in his arm produced small tumours there within days.
But the patients were never informed of this, and if they did happen to ask were told they were being "tested for immunity". We are told that Southam was prosecuted for this much later in It was not until that there was any mention in law of "informed consent. After her death, four of Henrietta Lacks's children, Lawrence, Deborah, Sonny and Joe, were put in the charge of Ethel, a friend of the family who had been very envious of Henrietta.
It appears that she was incredibly cruel to the children, hardly ever feeding them until late, after a day's work, when they would be given a meagre crust. She would also drag the youngest one, Joe, out of bed at will, and beat him unmercifully.
Joe was only 4 months old when his mother died and grew up to have severe behavioural problems. In fact later on on life, all these children grew to have not only health problems including all being almost deaf but a myriad of social problems too - being involved in burglary, assault and drugs - and spent a lot of their lives in prison.
One of Henrietta's five children had been put in "Crownsville Hospital for the Negro Insane" when she was still tiny, because Henrietta was too ill to care for her any more. The story of this child, which is gradually told through Skloot's text as more of it is revealed, is heart-breaking. It is not clear why Elsie was so slow, but her mental retardation is now thought to be partly due to syphilis, and partly due to being born on the home-house stone floor - which was routine for such families at the time - and banging her head during birth.
It was not known what had subsequently happened to Elsie until Skloot's research, but then some records were discovered. A photograph of Elsie shows a miserable child apparently in pain in a distorted position. Apparently brain scans then necessitated draining the surrounding brain fluid. Never mind that the patient might then suffer violent headaches, fits and vomiting for months until the fluid reformed; it gave a better picture.
Many people had been sent to this institution because of "idiocy" or epilepsy; the assumption now is that that they were incarcerated to get them out of the way, and that tests like this, often for research, were routine. Figures from , when Elsie died, showed that at that time the hospital had patients, which was over the maximum capacity.
The ratio of doctors to patients was 1 doctor for patients. Add into this the appalling inhumanity of history where white people used black people for their own ends, and the fears of Henrietta's family and community become inevitable.
There had been stories for generations of white-coated doctors coming at dead of night and experimenting on black people. This became confused - or perhaps vindicated - by the Ku Klux Klan. Stories of voodoo, charismatic religious experiences, dire poverty, lack of basic education one of Henrietta's brothers was more fortunate in that he had 4 years' schooling in total untreated health problems and the prevailing 's attitudes of never questioning the doctor, all fed into the mix resulting in ignorance and occasional hysteria.
Much of the first part of this book includes descriptions of scientific research and discoveries; both the theory and practise of how genes were isolated. Alternating with this is the background to the racial tensions, and the history of Henrietta Lacks' ancestry and family. Rebecca Skloot, a science writer, had been fascinated by the potential story since school days, when she first heard of HeLa cells, but nobody seemed to know anything about them.
She started this book in her 20's, and spent a decade researching it, financed by credit cards and student loans. As a white woman she was treated with gross suspicion by all Henrietta Lacks's family. Eventually she formed a good relationship with Deborah, but it took a year before Deborah would even speak to her, and Deborah's brothers were very resistant.
Several of them were pastors, as was James Pullam, her husband. They believed the Bible literally and had many fears about how Henrietta's cells were used. Deborah herself could not understand how they were immortal. Could her mother's cells feel pain when they were exploded, or infected? Would they develop into half-human half-chicken freaks when they were split and combined with chicken cells?
Were there millions of clones all looking like her mother wandering around London? The media worldwide had played its part in adding to these fears, which had been spawned by a genuine ignorance. The interviews with Henrietta's family, and the progress and discoveries Skloot made accompanied by Deborah in the second part of the book, do make the reader uneasy. Indeed parts of these passages read like a trashy novel.
Skloot says she wanted to report the conversation verbatim, so the vernacular is reported intact. Fair enough. But there is a lot of, "Deborah shouted" or, "Lawrence yelled". Of course they did! All of Henrietta's children had severe health problems, probably due to a variety of factors; their environment, upbringing and genetic inheritance.
They were all very hard of hearing, so yes, they would shout when amongst themselves. Add to this Skloot's tendency to describe the attributes and appearance of a family member as "beautiful hazel-nut brown skin" or "twinkling eyes" and there is a whiff of condescension which does not sit well.
Does it add anything to this account? Would a description of the author as having "raven-black hair and full glossy lips" help? Of course not. The author may feel she is being complimentary; she is not. She is being patronising. But it is difficult to know how else the total incomprehension and ignorance of how a largely white society operated could have been conveyed, other than by this verbatim reportage, even though at worst it comes across as extremely crass, and at best gently humorous.
It would be convenient to imagine that these appalling cases were a thing of the past. But the book continues detailing injustices until the date of its publication in Henrietta's son, Sonny had a quintuple bypass in Skloot reports, "The last thing he remembered before falling unconscious under the anesthesia was a doctor standing over him saying his mother's cells were one of the most important things that had ever happened in medicine.
There was recognition. She's the most important person in the world and her family [are] living in poverty. If our mother [is] so important to science, why can't we get health insurance? It was discovered years later that because she had syphilis, she had the genital warts HPV virus, which does actually invade the DNA. There is an intriguing section on this, as well as the "HeLa bomb" , where one doctor painstakingly proved to the whole of the scientific community that a lot of their research had been flawed, as HeLa cells were contaminating many of the other cells they had been working with and drawing conclusions from.
They were so virulent that they could travel on the smallest particle of dust in the atmosphere, and because Gey had given them so generously, there was no real record of where they had all ended up. Deborah herself always lived in fear of inheriting her mother's cancer. Because of this she readily submitted to tests. Victor McKusick took blood samples, which Deborah believed were for "cancer tests. This is another example of chronic misunderstanding. He knew of the family's mental anguish and the unfair treatment they had had.
He thought she understood why he wanted the blood. He gave her an autographed copy of his book - a technical manual on Genetics.
Of this, Deborah commented wryly, "It would have been nice if he'd told me what the damn thing said too. The injustices however, continue. Pharmaceutical companies, scientists and universities now control what research is done, and the costs of the resulting tests and therapies. These are the genes which are responsible for most hereditary breast cancers. They had licensed the use of the test. Anyone who ignored it received a threat of litigation.
Eventually in they were sued by the American Civil Liberties Union, representing a huge number of people including , scientists for inhibiting research. The commercialisation of human biological materials has now become big business. There seems to have been some attempts at restitution since this book was published, the most recent being in August There was an agreement between the family and The National Institutes of Health to give the family some control over the access to the cells' DNA code, and a promise of acknowledgement on scientific papers.
The committee set to oversee this arrangement will have 6 members, 2 of whom will be members of the family. The wheels have been set in motion. All in all this is an important and startlingly original book by a dedicated and compassionate author. It speaks to every one of us, regardless of our colour, nationality or class. Skloot admitted that it took a long time to decide the structure of the book, in order to include all the important aspects that she wished to.
There are three sections: "Life", "Death" and "Immortality" , plus an "Afterword". The main thrust throughout is clearly the enduring injustice the Lacks family suffered. So perhaps the final words should be Joe's, or as he changed his name when he converted to Islam in prison , Zakariyya's: "I believe what them doctors did was wrong. Them cells was stolen! Those fools come take blood from us sayin they need to run tests and not tell us that all these years they done profitized off of her….
You don't lie and clone behind their backs. That's wrong - it's one of the most violating parts of this whole thing…. Then doctors say her cells [are] so important and did all this and that to help people. But it didn't do no good for her, and it don't do no good for us.
If me and my sister need something, we can't even go and see a doctor cause we can't afford it. For how many others will it also be too late? View all 81 comments. Aug 31, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it Shelves: biography , 21th-century , medicine , health , history , literature , science , united-states. 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.
Shelves: audiobook , buddy-read. There are some books that I finish and am left in awe, questioning everything that I thought I knew on a subject. Or, as is the case hear, having learned so much about which I knew nothing. My jaw is still on the floor after I finished this book and I can only imagine the controversies and discussions it might provoke.
A thank you goes out to three Goodreads friends who recommended that I read this book and open an avenue for discussion. Aven, Brenda, and Rae, I hope we can begin a wild and intr There are some books that I finish and am left in awe, questioning everything that I thought I knew on a subject. Aven, Brenda, and Rae, I hope we can begin a wild and intriguing dialogue, pulling others into the mix as things gain momentum.
Who was Henrietta Lacks? What are HeLa cells? These are two of the foundational questions that Rebecca Skloot sought to answer in this poignant biographical piece. While I have tackled a number of biographies in my time as a reader, Skloot offered a unique approach to the genre in publication. Henrietta Lacks grew up in rural Virginia, picking tobacco and made ends meet as best she could. After marrying, she had a brood of children, including two of note, Elsie and Deborah, whose significance becomes apparent as the reader delves deeper into the narrative.
Skloot offered up a succinct, but detailed narrative of how Lacks found an unusual mass inside her and was sent from her doctor to a specialist at Johns Hopkins yes, THAT medical centre for treatment. The mass was malignant and Lacks was deemed to have cervical cancer. Her surgeon, following the precedent of many doctors in the early s, took samples of her tumour as well as that of the healthy part of her cervix, hoping to be able to have the cells survive so they could be analysed.
Past attempts by doctors and scientists failed to keep cells alive for very long, which led to the constant slicing and saving technique used by those in the medical profession, when the opportunity arose.
As it turns out, Lacks' cells were not only fascinating to explore, but George Gey Head of Tissue Culture Research at Johns Hopkins noticed that they lasted indefinitely, as long as they were properly fed.
Gey realised that he had something on his hands and tried to get approval from the Lacks family, though did so in an extremely opaque manner. After Lacks succumbed to the cancer, doctors sought to perform an autopsy, which might allow them complete access to Lacks' body. Ignorant of what was going on, Henrietta's husband agreed, thinking that this was only to ensure his children and subsequent generations would not suffer the agony that cancer brought upon Henrietta.
So began the conniving and secretive nature of George Gey. He harvested these 'special cells' and named them "HeLa", a brief combination of the original patient's two names.
Their phenomenal growth and sustainability led him to ship them all over the country and eventually the world, though the Lacks family had no idea this was going on. HeLa cells were studied to create a polio vaccine Jonas Salk used them at the University of Pittsburgh , helped to better understand cellular reactions to nuclear testing, space travel, and introduction of cancer cells into an otherwise healthy body during curious and somewhat inhumane tests on Ohio inmates.
During all this, Johns Hopkins remained completely aware of what was going on and the transmission of HeLa cells around the globe, though did not think to inform the Lacks family, perhaps for fear that they would halt the use of these HeLa cells. Through the use of the term 'HeLa' cells, no one was the wiser and no direct acknowledgement of the long-deceased Henrietta Lacks need be made.
Skloot provided much discussion about the uses, selling, 'donating', and experimenting that took place, including segments of the scientific community in America that were knowingly in violation of the Nuremberg Rules on human experimentation, though they danced their own legal jig to get around it all. The crux of the biography lay on this conundrum, though it would only find its true impact by exploring the lives of those Henrietta Lacks left behind after her death. Skloot took the time to pepper chapters with the history of the Lacks family as they grew up and, eventually, what happened when they were made aware that the HeLa cells existed, over two decades after they were obtained and Henrietta had died.
Skloot split this other biographical piece into two parts, which eventually merge into one, documenting her research trips and interviews with the family alongside the presentation of a narrative that explores the fruits of those sit-down interviews.
That Skloot tried to remain somewhat neutral is apparent, though through her connection to Henrietta's youngest daughter, Deborah, there was an obvious bias that developed. Superimposing these two narratives would, hopefully, offer the reader a chance to feel a personal connection to the Lacks family and the struggles they went through. In her discussions of the Lacks family, Skloot pulled no punches and presented the raw truths of criminal activity, abuse, addiction, and poverty alongside happy gatherings and memories of Henrietta.
No biographical piece would be complete if it were only window dressing and trying to paint a rosy picture of this maligned family without offering at least a little peek into their daily lives. However, it balanced out and Skloot ended up with what the reader might call a decent introduction to this run of the mill family unit.
Their ire at being duped by Johns Hopkins was apparent, alongside the dichotomy that HeLa cells were so popular, yet the family remained in dire poverty in the poor areas of Baltimore.
The legal ramifications of HeLa cell usage was discussed at various points in the book, though there was no firm case related to it, at least not one including the Lacks family. While the courts surely fell short in codifying ownership of cells and research done on them, the focus of Skloot's book was the social injustice by Johns Hopkins, not the ineptitude of the US Supreme Court, as Cohen showed while presenting Buck v. Bell to the curious audience. While George Gey vowed that he gave away the HeLa cell samples to anyone who wanted them, surely the chain reaction and selling of them in catalogues thereafter allowed someone to line their pockets.
Skloot offers up numerous mentions from the family, usually through Deborah, that the Lacks family was not seeking to get rich off of this discovery of immortal cells. While companies were spending millions and profiting billions from the early testing of HeLa cells, no one in the family could afford to see a doctor or purchase the medicines they needed all of which came about because of tests HeLa cells facilitated!
It is both fascinating and angering to see the system wash their hands of the guilt related to immoral collecting and culturing of these HeLa cells. Skloot did explore the slippery slope of cells and tissue as discarded waste, as well as the need for consent in testing them, something the reader ought to spend some time exploring once the biographical narrative ends.
It is sure to confound and confuse even the most well-grounded reader. The latter chapters touched upon the aptly used word from the title "Immortal" as it relates to Henrietta Lacks.
Be it a biography that placed a story behind the woman, a detailed discussion of how the HeLa cell came into being and how its presence is all over the medical world, or that medical advancements as we know them will allow Henrietta Lacks' being to live on for eternity, the reader can reflect on which rationale best suits them. While there is a religious undertone in the biography as it relates to this, Christianity is not inculcated into the reader's mind, as it was not when Skloot learned about these things.
Do I know Henrietta Lacks any better now, after Skloot completed her work? Most definitely! Can I, a complete scientific dunce, better understand HeLa cells and the idea behind cell growth and development?
Do I feel there was an injustice done to the Lacks family by Johns Hopkins in and for decades to come? Yes, I do harbour a strong resentment to the duplicitous attitude undertaken by a hospital whose founder sought to ensure those who could not receive medical care on their own be helped and protected. Is there a lingering legal argument to be made for compensatory damages or at least some fiduciary responsibility owed to the Lacks family?
That is a very grey area for me, only further complicated by the legal discussions in the Afterward and the advancement of new and complicated scientific discoveries, which also bore convoluted legal arguments. I will say this Maybe then, Henrietta can live on in all of us, immortal in some form or another. Kudos, Madam Skloot for intriguing someone whose scientific background is almost nil. You brought numerous stories to life and helped me see just how powerful one woman can be, silenced by death and the ignorance of what those around her were doing.
Nov 13, carol. Overall, a four star read that should probably be required reading for both biology and American history classes. Actually, it was a far more interesting read than that makes it sound.
While I had heard a great deal of buzz on the book, I wasn't prepared for how the story evolved. The book alternates between Henrietta Lacks' personal history, that of her family, a little of medical history and Skoot's actual pursuit of the story, which helps develop the story in historical context.
Skoots incl Overall, a four star read that should probably be required reading for both biology and American history classes. Skoots included a lot more science than I expected, and even with ten years in the medical field, I was horrified at times. Skoots does a decent job of maintaining a journalistic tone, but some of the things she relates are terrible, from the way Henrietta grew up to cervical cancer treatment in the 50s and 60s.
These were the days before cancer treatments approached the precision medicine it is aiming for today, and the treatments resembled nothing so much as trying to cut fingernails with garden shears.
Just the thought of a radioactive seed tucked in the uterus causing tissue burn was enough to give me sympathetic cramps. Part of the evil in the book is the violence her family inflicted on each other, and it's one of the truly uncomfortable areas.
I think that discomfort is important, because part of where this story comes from has to do with slavery and poverty. There isn't really an ethical high ground here, and that's part of Skoot's skill in setting up the story, and part of the problem in being a white woman telling the story of a black woman.
The only reason I didn't give this a five star rating is that the narrative started to fall apart at the end, leaving behind the stories of the cell line and focus more on the breakdown of Henrietta's daughter, Deborah. While I understand she is the touchstone for the story, that she is partly telling the story of the mother through the daughter, much of Henrietta and the science is sidelined.
Interesting questions popped up while reading; namely, why does everyone equate Henrietta's cancer cells with her person? As an illustration, if you tell people they have a cancerous tumor, the reaction is "get rid of it. It is not "them. While that might be cold comfort, it's a huge philosophical and scientific question that is the pivot point for a number of issues. Treating the cells as if they were "normal" is part of what lead the scientists into disaster as evidenced by the discovery that so many cell lines were HeLa contaminated I don't believe that transmission mechanism was explained either, which irks me.
It also could be the basis for a sophisticated legal and ethical argument. View all 20 comments. Jan 07, Dan Schwent rated it really liked it Shelves: When a poor woman dies of cervical cancer in , her cancerous cells live on. But what happens when her biological material generates billions of dollars for the drug and pharmaceutical industry, leaving her dirt poor descendants in the lurch?
Yeah, I know I wrote that like the teaser for one of my mysteries but the only mystery here is how people who have profited from the diseased cells that killed a woman can sleep at night while her kids and grand kids don't have two nickels to rub together When a poor woman dies of cervical cancer in , her cancerous cells live on. Yeah, I know I wrote that like the teaser for one of my mysteries but the only mystery here is how people who have profited from the diseased cells that killed a woman can sleep at night while her kids and grand kids don't have two nickels to rub together.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is really two stories. One of Henrietta Lacks and her cancer cells that lived decades beyond her years, and the other of Rebecca Skloot and the surviving members of the Lacks family. Henrietta Lacks married her counsin, contracted multiple STD's due to his philandering ways, and died of misdiagnosed cervical cancer by the time she was However, the cancer that killed her survives today in the form of HeLa cells, which have been taken to the moon, exposed to every manner of radiation and illness, and all sorts of other experiments.
While other people are raking in money due to the HeLa research, the surviving Lacks family doesn't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, bringing me to the real meat of the book: The pharmaceutical industry is a bunch of dickbags.
Imagine having something removed that generated billions of dollars of revenue for people you've never met and still needing to watch your budget so you can pay your mortage. Shit no, but that's the way it is, apparently. It also seems illogical that you can patent things you didn't create but again, that's the way the cookie crumbles.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is an eye-opening look at someone most of us have never heard of but probably owe some sort of debt to. Also, it drags the big money pharma companies out in the sun. Sadly, they do not burst into flames like the vampires they are. Four out of five stars.
I'm going to go read something happy now. View all 12 comments. The gift of life is surely the greatest gift of all. So how can the story of the remarkable woman who gave that gift over and over again to millions of people have been overlooked for so long? And click here to read excerpts of the book. Photos, videos, and more for teachers and students. Reading group guides, videos, photos, and more.
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