Who, you might ask, is Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951) and why is she the subject of a book? On the surface, this short-lived African American Virginian seems an unlikely candidate for immortality. The most remarkable thing about her, some might argue, is that she had ten children during her thirty-one years on earth. Actually, we all owe Ms. Lacks a great debt and some of us owe her our lives. As Rebecca Skloot tells us in this riveting human story, Henrietta was the involuntary donor of cells from her cancerous tumors that have been cultured to create an immortal cell line for medical research. These so-called HeLa cells have not only generated billions of dollars for the medical industry; they have helped uncover secrets of cancers, viruses, fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping. A vivid, exciting story; a 2010 Discover Great New Books finalist; a surprise bestseller in hardcover. Now in paperback and NOOKbook.
Dwight Garner
…one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I've read in a very long time. A thorny and provocative book about cancer, racism, scientific ethics and crippling poverty, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks also floods over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had managed to distill and purify the more addictive qualities of "Erin Brockovich," Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The Andromeda Strain. More than 10 years in the making, it feels like the book Ms. Skloot was born to write. It signals the arrival of a raw but quite real talent…[The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks] has brains and pacing and nerve and heart, and it is uncommonly endearing.
—The New York Times
Eric Roston
Skloot's vivid account…reads like a novel. The prose is unadorned, crisp and transparent…This book, labeled "science--cultural studies," should be treated as a work of American history. It's a deftly crafted investigation of a social wrong committed by the medical establishment, as well as the scientific and medical miracles to which it led. Skloot's compassionate account can be the first step toward recognition, justice and healing.
—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
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.)
Booklist
Writing with a novelist's artistry, a biologist's expertise, and the zeal of an investigative reporter, Skloot tells a truly astonishing story of racism and poverty, science and conscience, spirituality and family driven by a galvanizing inquiry into the sanctity of the body and the very nature of the life force. Starred review.
Lisa Margonelli
…Rebecca Skloot introduces us to the "real live woman," the children who survived her, and the interplay of race, poverty, science and one of the most important medical discoveries of the last 100 years. Skloot narrates the science lucidly, tracks the racial politics of medicine thoughtfully and tells the Lacks family's often painful history with grace. She also confronts the spookiness of the cells themselves, intrepidly crossing into the spiritual plane on which the family has come to understand their mother's continued presence in the world. Science writing is often just about "the facts." Skloot's book, her first, is far deeper, braver and more wonderful.
—The New York Times Book Review
Kirkus Reviews
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later. In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine-all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre-civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field. Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance betweensociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics. Tie-in with multicity author lecture schedule. Agent: Simon Lipskar/Writers House
The Barnes & Noble Review - Jerry Coyne
Henrietta Lacks lives a shadowy life as a footnote in biology textbooks. I first encountered her when taking a college course in cell biology: the cells used in a particular experiment, we learned, were "HeLa cells," which, though human, can grow independently outside the body in specially created laboratory conditions. They were named for the woman, Helen Lane, from whom they were originally derived. And that was all; having explained this, my professor returned to discussing the experiment and its significance. Like a drowned corpse bobbing up from the dark depths of footnote-dom, Helen Lane had surfaced briefly, only to descend again into obscurity. I didn't give her a second thought.
In contrast, science writer Rebecca Skloot also had a Helen Lane footnote moment in high school, but saw in that footnote the nucleus of a story about science and society. After ten years of HeLa sleuthing, Skloot's hunch has paid off handsomely: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a modern classic of science writing.
Let me qualify that. This isn't science writing in the sense of Stephen Jay Gould or Richard Dawkins: Skloot doesn't spend a lot of time describing or extolling scientific discoveries. For her, the science is a bit player -- though an important one -- in a complex and fascinating drama about how medical research intersected the lives of a poor black family in America. Her mixture of science and biography is sui generis, and its themes profound: racism, ethics, and scientific illiteracy.
The first thing Skloot learned was that "Helen Lane" was not the woman's real name, but a journalist's pseudonym for Henrietta Lacks. Born in1920 to a poor tobacco-farming family from southern Virginia, Lacks married and, following her husband's job, moved to Maryland. At age 31, she presented herself at Johns Hopkins Hospital, complaining of abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding. Doctors found an evil-looking purple growth on her cervix, which turned out to be malignant. She was given the latest treatment -- a packet of radium sewn inside her vagina -- but it didn't work. Eight months later Lacks died in agony, leaving five young children.
But for a quirk of fate, Lacks would be just another working person who lived and died in obscurity. A slice of her biopsy fell into the hands of George Gey, a researcher at Hopkins who, with the help of his wife Mary, had spent fruitless years trying to keep human cells alive in the laboratory. (This "tissue culture" is crucial for medical research since it obviates the need to experiment on living patients.) For some reason Helen's cells, which Gey dubbed "HeLa," not only lived, but divided rapaciously, becoming the first human cells that could be cultured indefinitely in the lab. We now know why: Lacks's cells have elevated amounts of an enzyme that keeps them from ageing.
Convinced that HeLa cells were the key to curing cancer, Gey handed them out gratis to dozens of researchers. And they became a scientific gold mine, used to develop the first polio vaccines, test chemotherapy drugs like Taxol, find treatments for AIDS, work out techniques for in vitro fertilization, and map genes onto human chromosomes. Even now, after nearly sixty years, 14 scientific papers on HeLa cells are published every day. Clearly, Henrietta Lacks achieved both physical and scientific immortality.
But her family was unaware of her distinction, and although biotechnology companies made millions of dollars peddling HeLa cells, her children never saw a dime. In fact, they didn't even know about the famous cells until years after Henrietta's death, finding out only when her daughter-in-law, who learned about them by accident, called the family with a chilling message: "Part of your mother, it's alive!" The commercial exploitation of Lacks's cells made her kin feel exploited and resentful. It took Skloot a year to get the family to return her phone calls, several more before they opened up completely. Eventually Skloot became friend and confidante to Henrietta's daughter Deborah, who was only an infant when her mother died. Deborah's search for the mother she never knew, and for the significance of her still-growing cells, is the pivot on which Skloot's story turns.
As Skloot led her through the maze of science, Deborah became deeply ambivalent. On one hand she was proud of her mother's contributions to medicine, on the other she became paranoid and erratic, worried that she would catch her mother's cancer or be pursued by the same doctors who, she believed, killed Henrietta. The tumultuous friendship between author and subject makes for some amazing vignettes: Deborah seeing her mother's cells for the first time under a microscope ("Oh God," she gasped. "I can't believe all that's my mother"); Deborah worrying that the experimental fusion of HeLa cells with plant cells would produce a "human monster that was half her mother, half tobacco"; Deborah being exorcised of the demon cells by her evangelical cousin Gary as Skloot looks on ("LORD, I KNOW you sent Miss Rebecca to help LIFT THE BURDEN of them CELLS!").
The family finally makes peace with HeLa, deciding that "God chose Henrietta as an angel who would be reborn as immortal cells." Despite this, Skloot's tale doesn't end happily. But I defy you to read it without being moved. Or without thinking, for beneath the book runs a subliminal conversation about medical ethics. Apart from the selfless George Gey, Skloot's scientists and doctors behaved less than honorably. Henrietta Lacks's cells were cultured, disseminated, and sold without her or the family's knowledge or consent. Doctors with more curiosity than morality injected the cells into unsuspecting patients to see if they could cause cancer. The aggressive growth of HeLa cells caused them to contaminate other human cell cultures throughout the world, but scientists refused to admit the problem lest they lose reputation and funding. And, to track down this contamination, scientists at Johns Hopkins requested blood samples from Deborah and her siblings, but misled them by saying they were being "tested for cancer." Skloot avoids moralizing, but the injustice done to the Lacks family is palpable. One of many reasons to buy this wonderful book is to redress that injury: part of the profits go to a scholarship fund for Henrietta Lacks's descendants.
Skloot's afterword describes the current state of medical ethics. Sadly, progress has been slow. Yes, patients' names and records are now private, and scientists can't experiment on living subjects without informed consent, but doctors can still remove, profit from, and even patent a patient's tissues and DNA without her permission. This has become increasingly worrisome in the modern age of genomics. Since anyone's DNA might harbor a gene that is medically or commercially useful, all of us are fertile ground for genetic prospecting. That's not inherently bad, but researchers should remember the first dictum of medical ethics: patients are fellow human beings, not just collections of genes and tissues. Skloot describes how that insight struck George Gey's assistant when she saw Henrietta Lacks, nails carefully tended, laid out on the autopsy table:
"When I saw those toenails," Mary told me years later, "I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh geez, she's a real person. I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we'd been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I'd never thought of it that way."
--Jerry Coyne
From the Publisher
"One of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time . . . The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks . . . floods over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had managed to distill and purify the more addictive qualities of Erin Brockovich, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The Andromeda Strain. . . . It feels like the book Ms. Skloot was born to write. It signals the arrival of a raw but quite real talent.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"Skloot's vivid account begins with the life of Henrietta Lacks, who comes fully alive on the page. . . . Immortal Life reads like a novel.”—Eric Roston, The Washington Post
“Gripping . . . by turns heartbreaking, funny and unsettling . . . raises troubling questions about the way Mrs. Lacks and her family were treated by researchers and about whether patients should control or have financial claims on tissue removed from their bodies.”—Denise Grady, The New York Times
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a fascinating read and a ringing success. It is a well-written, carefully-researched, complex saga of medical research, bioethics, and race in America. Above all it is a human story of redemption for a family, torn by loss, and for a writer with a vision that would not let go.”—Douglas Whynott, The Boston Globe
"Riveting . . . raises important questions about medical ethics . . . It's an amazing story. . . . Deeply chilling . . . Whether those uncountable HeLa cells are a miracle or a violation, Skloot tells their fascinating story at last with skill, insight and compassion.”—Colette Bancroft, St. Petersburg Times
“The history of HeLa is a rare and powerful combination of race, class, gender, medicine, bioethics, and intellectual property; far more rare is the writer than can so clearly fuse those disparate threads into a personal story so rich and compelling. Rebecca Skloot has crafted a unique piece of science journalism that is impossible to put down—or to forget.”—Seed magazine
“No one can say exactly where Henrietta Lacks is buried: during the many years Rebecca Skloot spent working on this book, even Lacks’s hometown of Clover, Virginia, disappeared. But that did not stop Skloot in her quest to exhume, and resurrect, the story of her heroine and her family. What this important, invigorating book lays bare is how easily science can do wrong, especially to the poor. The issues evoked here are giant: who owns our bodies, the use and misuse of medical authority, the unhealed wounds of slavery ... and Skloot, with clarity and compassion, helps us take the long view. This is exactly the sort of story that books were made to tell—thorough, detailed, quietly passionate, and full of revelation.”—TED CONOVER, author of Newjack and The Routes of Man
“It’s extremely rare when a reporter’s passion finds its match in a story. Rarer still when the people in that story courageously join that reporter in the search for what we most need to know about ourselves. When this occurs with a moral journalist who is also a true writer, a human being with a heart capable of holding all of life’s damage and joy, the stars have aligned. This is an extraordinary gift of a book, beautiful and devastating—a work of outstanding literary reportage. Read it! It’s the best you will find in many many years.”—ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC, author of Random Family
”The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks brings to mind the work of Philip K. Dick and Edgar Allan Poe. But this tale is true. Rebecca Skloot explores the racism and greed, the idealism and faith in science that helped to save thousands of lives but nearly destroyed a family. This is an extraordinary book, haunting and beautifully told.”—ERIC SCHLOSSER, author of Fast Food Nation
“Skloot’s book is wonderful — deeply felt, gracefully written, sharply reported. It is a story about science but, much more, about life.”—SUSAN ORLEAN, author of The Orchid Thief
“This is a science biography like the world has never seen. What if one of the great American women of modern science and medicine—whose contribution underlay historic discoveries in genetics, the treatment and prevention of disease, reproduction, and the unraveling of the human genome—was a self-effacing African-American tobacco farmer from the Deep South? A devoted mother of five who was escorted briskly to the Jim Crow section of Johns Hopkins for her cancer treatments? What if the untold millions of scientists, doctors, and patients enriched and healed by her gift never, to this day, knew her name? What if her contribution was made without her knowledge or permission? Ladies and gentlemen, meet Henrietta Lacks. Chances are, at the level of your DNA, your inoculations, your physical health and microscopic well-being, you’ve already been introduced.”—Melissa Fay Greene, author of Praying for Sheetrock and There Is No Me Without You
“Heartbreaking and powerful, unsettling yet compelling, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a richly textured story of the hidden costs of scientific progress. Deftly weaving together history, journalism and biography, Rebecca Skloot's sensitive account tells of the enduring, deeply personal sacrifice of this African American woman and her family and, at long last, restores a human face to the cell line that propelled 20th century biomedicine. A stunning illustration of how race, gender and disease intersect to produce a unique form of social vulnerability, this is a poignant, necessary and brilliant book.”—Alondra Nelson, Columbia University; editor of Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life
“Rebecca Skloot has written a marvelous book so original that it defies easy description. She traces the surreal journey that a tiny patch of cells belonging to Henrietta Lacks’s body took to the forefront of science. At the same time, she tells the story of Lacks and her family—wrestling the storms of the late twentieth century in America—with rich detail, wit, and humanity. The more we read, the more we realize that these are not two separate stories, but one tapestry. It’s part The Wire, part The Lives of the Cell, and all fascinating.”—Carl Zimmer, author of Microcosm
“If virtues could be cultured like cells, Rebecca Skloot’s would be a fine place to start—a rare combination of compassion, courage, wisdom, and intelligence. This book is extraordinary. As a writer and a human being, Skloot stands way, way out there ahead of the pack.”—MARY ROACH, author of Stiff and Bonk
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks takes the reader on a remarkable journey—compassionate, troubling, funny, smart—and irresistible. Along the way, Rebecca Skloot will change the way you see medical science and lead you to wonder who we should value more—the researcher or the research subject? Ethically fascinating and completely engaging—I couldn’t recommend it more.”—DEBORAH BLUM, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook and The Monkey Wars and the Helen Firstbrook Franklin professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
“This remarkable story of how the cervical cells of the late Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman, enabled subsequent discoveries from the polio vaccine to in vitro fertilization is extraordinary in itself; the added portrayal of Lacks's full life makes the story come alive with her humanity and the palpable relationship between race, science, and exploitation.—PAULA J. GIDDINGS, author of Ida, A Sword Among Lions; Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 Professor, Afro-American Studies, Smith College
“Rebecca Skloot’s steadfast commitment to illuminating the life and contribution of Henrietta Lacks, one of the many vulnerable subjects used for scientific advancement, and the subsequent impact on her family is a testament to the power of solid investigative journalism. Her deeply compelling account of one family’s long and troubled relationship with America’s vast medical-industrial complex is sure to become a cherished classic.”—ALLEN M. HORNBLUM, author of Acres of Skin and Sentenced to Science
“Writing with a novelist’s artistry, a biologist’s expertise, and the zeal of an investigative reporter, Skloot tells a truly astonishing story of racism and poverty, science and conscience, spirituality and family driven by a galvanizing inquiry into the sanctity of the body and the very nature of the life force.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Science journalist Skloot makes a remarkable debut with this multilayered story about ‘faith, science, journalism, and grace.’…Recalls Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family…A rich, resonant tale of modern science, the wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit society’s most vulnerable people.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Library Journal
★ 08/01/2014
Accessible science at its best, the audio version gives the story of Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, all the gravity and pathos it deserves. Narrated by Cassandra Campbell and Bahni Turpin, who also worked together on The Help.
MAY 2010 - AudioFile
This multifaceted story interweaves a mini-biography of Henrietta Lacks and her family with an insider's look at the history of medical research and Skloot's journey to unlock the secrets of both. Lacks was a terminal cancer patient, and the cells doctors preserved (without her knowledge or consent) led to many medical breakthroughs. Interestingly, Caucasian Cassandra Campbell admirably portrays African-American Lacks and her associates, while only the small part of Lacks's daughter is assigned to fellow African-American Bahni Turpin. The fine narration underscores the pain and frustration her family feels after Lacks' death, the purloining of her cells, and the world's failure to recognize her role. However difficult it is to acknowledge unscrupulous medical experimentation, Campbell's star quality rivets listeners to this tribute to one whose life continues to improve health care worldwide. J.J.B. 2011 Audies Winner © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
