Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She
was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her
slave ancestors, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became
one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal"
human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though
she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all
HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50
million metric tons--as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings.
HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered
secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped
lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning,
and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an
unmarked grave.
Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the
"colored" ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark
white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from
Henrietta's small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia--a land of
wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo--to East
Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and
struggle with the legacy of her cells.
Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more
than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating
HeLa began using her husband and children in research without
informed consent. And though the cells had launched a
multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials,
her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so
brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family--past and
present--is inextricably connected to the dark history of
experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and
the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.
Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became
enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family--especially Henrietta's
daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother's
cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her
mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with
viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister,
Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And
if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her
children afford health insurance?
Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put
down, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" captures the beauty
and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human
consequences.
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