The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

A work of science writing might be a surprising addition to this list of storytellers, artists, and designers, but surely the life of the African American woman, mother, and cancer sufferer whose cell tissue became one of the most widely used biological lab media in contemporary medical research epitomizes creation and creativity.

Lacks’s history is a terrible story of racial anonymity and exploitation, which Skloot tells with extraordinary sensitivity. Always being sure to keep Lacks and her descendants at the forefront, Skloot both details the atrocities that sometimes underlie civilization’s progress and restores Lacks’s long overdue credit for making possible… show more.

Only dogged research could unearth the story of how one Black woman’s death – and the harvesting of her cells – could change the course of medical research.

It is a story of how some innocuous biological matter could grow into a hothouse of excess. Pharma companies enriched themselves reproducing the cells of Henrietta Lacks but did little or nothing for the family who lost their matriarch.  

For me, this book unleashed the idea of shaping deep research into a story can change our view of society.

Eventually, I had to have a mainstream book, right?

This book is a masterpiece thanks to Ms. Skloot’s extraordinary writing and her clear empathy for her subject, the Lacks family. This is so much more than the revelation of a medical marvel—the Lacks cells that have led to so many medical discoveries.

This is a story about racial equity in the healthcare system, about personal privacy, and about the crusade by a family to have their ancestor’s contribution to medical science recognized…to have Henrietta memorialized not just as a one-of-a-kind aggregate of genetic material but as a woman.

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There is a wonderful world of science writing out there, and this book is a great entry into that world. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is part science journalism, science history, and biography. Skloot introduced the world to Henrietta Lacks, a previously unknown woman whose cells have been responsible for some of the leading research and advances in medicine. In introducing the story of Lacks, Skloot, with obvious affection for both Lacks and her descendants, poses a number of important questions regarding race, ethics, and medical research.

The story of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman who died of cervical cancer in the 1950s and whose cells, named HeLa, are still used in research, is both an epic family recount and a reflection on the evolution and dilemmas of Bioethics.

Skloot’s gripping first-person narrative and solid journalistic style made this book a bestseller and the subject of a movie. I loved the way it humanized science through the perspective and extraordinary stories of ordinary people.

Henrietta Lacks was a Black tobacco farmer who got an aggressive form of cervical cancer. After a doctor at Johns Hopkins took a sample of her tumor, he quietly sent it down the hall to some scientists who had been trying to grow tissues in culture with little success. Lacks died, but her cells – which became known as HeLa – lived on, and became instrumental in the development of a polio vaccine, and several other scientific landmarks such as cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization. Skloot’s story is a wonderful passion project, and a quest to figure out… show more.