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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot
Broadway
March 2011
On Sale: March 8, 2011
400 pages
ISBN: 1400052181
EAN: 9781400052189
Paperback
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Non-Fiction
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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