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Rating: *****
Tags: General, United States, History, Biography & Autobiography, Biography, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, Medical, Autobiography, Cultural Heritage, African American Studies, African American women, Health & Fitness, Diseases, Patients, Cancer, Non-Fiction, Research, Adult, Ethics, Oncology, HeLa Cells, Medical ethics, Cancer - Patients - Virginia, Cancer - Research, Lacks; Henrietta - Health, Virginia, Cell Culture, Human Experimentation in Medicine, Cytology, Science, Henrietta - Health, Life Sciences, Lacks, Lang:en
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?
Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010:
From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line
of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in
modern science possible. And from that same life, and those
cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and
moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained
in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of
five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the
tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive
cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous
tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the
custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of
mid-century biology: human cells that could survive--even
thrive--in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency
gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs,
beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta's
family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health,
and their discovery decades later of her unknowing
contribution--and her cells' strange survival--left them full
of pride, anger, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly
but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories,
slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn
the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich
and haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our
bodies? And who carries our memories? --*Tom Nissley
*
Amazon Exclusive: Jad Abumrad Reviews *The Immortal
Life of Henrietta Lacks*
Jad Abumrad is host and creator of the public radio
hit
Radiolab, now in its seventh season and reaching
over a million people monthly.
Radiolab combines cutting-edge production with a
philosophical approach to big ideas in science and beyond,
and an inventive method of storytelling. Abumrad has won
numerous awards, including a National Headliner Award in
Radio and an American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS) Science Journalism Award. Read his exclusive
Amazon guest review of
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks:
Honestly, I can't imagine a better tale. A detective story that's at once mythically large and
painfully intimate. Just the simple facts are hard to believe: that in 1951, a
poor black woman named Henrietta Lacks dies of cervical cancer,
but pieces of the tumor that killed her--taken without her
knowledge or consent--live on, first in one lab, then in
hundreds, then thousands, then in giant factories churning out
polio vaccines, then aboard rocket ships launched into space.
The cells from this one tumor would spawn a multi-billion
dollar industry and become a foundation of modern
science--leading to breakthroughs in gene mapping, cloning and
fertility and helping to discover how viruses work and how
cancer develops (among a million other things). All of which is
to say: the science end of this story is enough to blow one's
mind right out of one's face. But what's truly remarkable about Rebecca Skloot's book is
that we also get the rest of the story, the part that could
have easily remained hidden had she not spent ten years
unearthing it: Who was Henrietta Lacks? How did she live? How
she did die? Did her family know that she'd become, in some
sense, immortal, and how did that affect them? These are
crucial questions, because science should never forget the
people who gave it life. And so, what unfolds is not only a
reporting tour de force but also a very entertaining account of
Henrietta, her ancestors, her cells and the scientists who grew
them. The book ultimately channels its journey of discovery though
Henrietta's youngest daughter, Deborah, who never knew her
mother, and who dreamt of one day being a scientist. As Deborah Lacks and Skloot search for answers, we're
bounced effortlessly from the tiny tobacco-farming Virginia
hamlet of Henrietta's childhood to modern-day Baltimore, where
Henrietta's family remains. Along the way, a series of
unforgettable juxtapositions: cell culturing bumps into faith
healings, cutting edge medicine collides with the dark truth
that Henrietta's family can't afford the health insurance to
care for diseases their mother's cells have helped to cure. Rebecca Skloot tells the story with great sensitivity,
urgency and, in the end, damn fine writing. I highly recommend
this book.
--Jad Abumrad
Look Inside *The Immortal Life of Henrietta
Lacks*
Click on thumbnails for larger images
Henrietta and David Lacks, circa 1945.Elsie Lacks,
Henrietta’s older daughter, about five years before she
was committed to Crownsville State Hospital, with a diagnosis
of “idiocy.”Deborah Lacks at about age four.The
home-house where Henrietta was raised, a four-room log cabin in
Clover, Virginia, that once served as slave quarters.
(1999)Main Street in downtown Clover, Virginia, where Henrietta
was raised, circa 1930s. Margaret Gey and Minnie, a lab technician, in the Gey lab at
Hopkins, circa 1951.Deborah with her children, LaTonya and
Alfred, and her second husband, James Pullum, in the
mid-1980s.In 2001, Deborah developed a severe case of hives
after learning upsetting new information about her mother and
sister.Deborah and her cousin Gary Lacks standing in front of
drying tobacco, 2001.The Lacks family in 2009. Starred Review. 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.
(Feb.)
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.Amazon.com Review
From Publishers Weekly
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