The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Paperback – Abridged, March 8, 2011

Rebecca Skloot has written a fascinating account about the gathering and utilization of human cells for medical research. It has achieved widespread acclaim for its appeal in both the scientific and lay communities. But there's much more. This book is also an ode to friendship, even love, as Skloot gathers together a wildly unbalanced family in an attempt to calm their cynical minds.THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS has been a runaway best seller since it was first published in 2010. It's amazing that a complicated topic would have such universal appeal. But give the author credit for taking a complex scientific subject, simplifying it, and infusing it with human interest, making the reader feel intelligent while still being entertained. It's a detective story with a technical background featuring real people you care about.One can imagine the emotion of having parts of a dead family member, in this case a mother, divided and spread around the world for purposes not fully understood. What parts are being used? What are they being used for? And what does it mean when you are told your beloved will live forever when you know she's dead? Although you might not accept the answers, being well educated might make them easier to grasp. But being totally ignorant about human cells, their study and usage, and medical procedures and their consequences, having a dead mother involved would surely cause great angst to most of us. Add the constant badgering of a notoriously ill mannered and prying news media and one can appreciate the torment to the remaining members of the Lacks family.We meet Deborah Lacks, Henrietta's daughter. She is troubled and vehemently opposed to further discussions of her mother's death and subsequent cell distribution. The rest of the family point to her as the final hurdle Skloot must overcome to get information about Henrietta's turbulent life. But she's not talking. Skloot's accounts of the gradual steps she must take to gain Deborah's cooperation are touching and brilliantly presented. The remaining family members reluctantly follow along.There is continuing scientific debate about the virulence of Henrietta Lacks's cells, or HeLa, as they are commonly known. They have powerful growth qualities and are eternal when most others don't even survive first cultivation. Her family had many ideas about that, mostly based on supposition or superstition. Some thought it was God's punishment for various transgressions by Henrietta. Others thought it was God's punishment for Adam's eating of Eve's apple or, perhaps, disease-causing spirits that hovered over Henrietta. One thought it possible that something alive had crawled into Henrietta, killed her, and kept on living. One thing was for sure. None of them knew what was happening to Henrietta either before or after her death. This created the anger and distrust that Rebecca Skloot was battling against to get her story together.The living relatives had much to distrust when it came to science, not the least being an inherent fear of any scientific experimentation with black people based on past experiences being widely publicized at the time. And there was the idea that a lot of money was being made with Henrietta's body parts, and the family members, who desperately needed financial assistance, were not getting one dime of it.Skloot tackles all these perplexing situations in an analytical and nonjudgmental manner. She is the embodiment of an investigative journalist; probing, indefatigable, brave. She is also a talented writer, but there is more than that about her. She gets intensely involved with Henrietta Lacks's survivors and her honesty and genuine affinity with their plight gains their reluctant cooperation. It took her ten years to do that.I was amazed at the depth of research in the book, the beauty and simplicity of the writing, and the importance of the subject. I believe this book deserves the highest prize for literature and that Rebecca Skloot's debut effort is nothing short of sheer genius.Schuyler T WallaceAuthor of TIN LIZARD TALES

The book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is about the life, death, and family life of a woman named Henrietta. When she turned 30 she developed an aggressive form cervical cancer and received treatment at John Hopkins hospital. However as they were treating her the doctor took a slice of her tumor and put it into a tube for testing. They did this with a lot of people back then all without patient consent. The doctor, specifically Gey Gardener, wanted to make an immortal cell line that didn’t die like the rest. Usually a day or two after they took the sample, it died. However Henrietta’s cells lived and continued to grow in as much space and they gave it. Though thought of as a fluke at first, her cells continue to divide to this day and is used in almost every laboratory. Because of their widespread nature, it is amazing how not many people know about the woman behind the cells. This is why the author decided to write this book. While the topic 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 incorporating Henrietta’s family.The easy to understand language is what makes the book available to such a wide audience. Whenever a science term or event was refereed to instead of requiring the reader to have prior knowledge everything was explained. At times it seemed that things were explained in too much detail but this is so that anyone can read it and understand. In book of this sort, usually a lot of terms are thrown around but that is not the case in this one. There were some times that things could have been left out because they involved basic information but she also included it so that people like Henrietta’s descendants, who had little to no formal education, could read it. By no means was this a strictly scientific book, in fact one of its other strong points was the human element.The author is in fact a character in this story. In order to write this story she had to get know the family of Henrietta which was not very easy. At one point she was calling Henrietta’s daughter every day just for the story. She got stood up in hotels, hung up on, and criticized but she stayed on the story. Because of that she got really close to Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. Her and Deborah formed a true bond and the author stayed with her even through panic attacks, health issues, bouts of extreme paranoia, and her eventual death. There was a very clear human element that pulled at heartstring that didn’t just stem from the author getting to know the family but from her researching and finding the small things. Some of these times include when Henrietta was dying. Instead of just saying that she died the author went in detail and included a really small but meaningful piece on page 81. “And everyone I talked to who might know said that Gey and Henrietta never met. Everyone, that is, except Laure Aurelian, a microbiologist who was Geys colleague at Hopkins. I’ll never forget it, Aurelian said. George told me he leaned over Henrietta’s bed and said, Your cells will make you immortal. He told Henrietta her cells would help save the lives of countless people, and she smiled. She told him she was glad her pain would come to some good for someone.” (81). That tiny moment said represented was so beautifully tragic and added a whole new level to the book.Another part that was really special about the book was the moral and ethical dilemmas. Henrietta’s cells were taken without her knowledge or permission. “No one had told Henrietta that TeLinde was collecting samples or asked if she wanted to be a donor Wharton picked up a sharp knife and shaved two dime-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta’s cervix” (39). The author makes a point of acknowledging that back then patients and doctors had a very strained relationship. Doctors would often experiment on their patient without permission. But also doctors weren’t required to tell the patient everything that was going on with them. There was one instant that the author pointed out a case where a man, Moore, had cancer and his doctor Golde, treated him but removed his spleen. But then the doctor started asking for numerous follow up appointments and went as far as paying for his plane ticket from the other side of the country to come see him until Moore figured out something fishy was going on. Moore found out that Golde was engineering a cell line from his cells because they produced a hard to come by protein. When Moore tried to sue he lost because Golde patented it and there was a ruling that once cells leave a patient's body, they are no longer their own. The only difference between this case and Henrietta’s was that the man was educated enough to fight this and even when the ruling was not in his favor he could make sure the doctor couldn’t take any more of his cells. The author also showed another example of the ethics of the medical practice. There was a case where a man went in for what he thought was a standard procedure but when he woke up he was paralysed from the waist down. He had no idea the risks of the procedure which could have influenced his decision of whether to get it or pursue another method of treatment.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 so good. Through every page I felt immersed in the story and the breakup of the chapters were masterful. I really enjoyed how the book was divided into chapter that jumped back and from when Henrietta’s childhood and when she got her diagnosis to her death and the author trying to find out more about her. It reads like a research novel. While it wasn’t as plot driven as a novel it wasn’t as analytical and clinical as a textbook. It was also more human and less persuasive than a newspaper article. I liked the way the author organised it because it guaranteed that something was always happening which is why the author organized it that way. It made it really interesting and informative. It also brought out themes of lack of health care for colored people in the 50’s, the spiritual belief of the link between body and soul, and the poverty that still exists today. I expected this book to be very clinical focus only on how the cells were used but I was pleasantly surprised. By the end of the book, the author reached the conclusion that Henrietta should be known and that her family should be either cared for or compensated for the distribution of their mother’s cells. The book as a whole goes very logically from start to finish and comes together very sadly but oddly satisfyingly with the death of Deborah and shows that the whole Lacks family had hard lives.