The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

 

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You can buy The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks...Here

You can find out more about Rebecca Skloot...Here

• The Blurb...

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Born a poor black tobacco farmer, her cancer cells – taken without asking her – became a multimillion-dollar industry and one of the most important tools in medicine. Yet Henrietta’s family did not learn of her ‘immortality’ until more than twenty years after her death, with devastating consequences . . .

Rebecca Skloot’s moving account is the story of the life, and afterlife, of one woman who changed the medical world forever. Balancing the beauty and drama of scientific discovery with dark questions about who owns the stuff our bodies are made of, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is an extraordinary journey in search of the soul and story of a real woman, whose cells live on today in all four corners of the world.

• Our Review...

I read this book as part of the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge. This week's prompt was "women in STEM." STEM refers to Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. You can view my list for the year...Here

The weekly prompts are great for driving me out of my comfort reading zones. I don't normally read non-fiction for much the same reason as I do not watch the news. I know the world is an awful place and I don't want to be reminded of it. I prefer fiction. It's a destination I can escape to. Non-fiction aka Real-Life is the place I want to escape from. 

And so to this meticulously researched story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor, uneducated, inbred African-American. Some cells were taken from her while she was being treated for cancer. Henrietta died but her cells became the first to be reproduced in a lab in perpetuity. Hence she achieved a form of immortality. In addition the cells have been traded and researched the world over and thanks to Henrietta numerous cures for various life ending diseases have been found. Isn't that great you ask? Well yes and no.

If it was all altruistic, it would all be fine and dandy but it's not. Some companies are making millions from Henrietta's cells. Again this would be ok if Henrietta's family shared in the financial bonanza but they don't. The doctors in the US in the 1950s didn't have to ask for consent to take and use her cells. Reading this book will break your heart as you read about her family's struggles with poverty, lack of education, crime, addiction etc knowing full well if justice was served Henrietta's family would have been lifted out of cess pool of poverty. Henrietta would have approved of this. Someone is getting immensely rich to this day because of this and it isn't her family. Her family have been treated like a natural resource, Like a free oil well. So they don't get any money, and in the shambles that is American health-care they don't even get free health care. Thank God for the NHS, the UKs greatest achievement. 

The author does a wonderful job of tying the various strands of scientific research, corporate dirty dealings and the human story of Henrietta's family together. These are so diverse subject lines that this is no mean feat. In particular she tells the tale of Deborah, Henrietta's daughter and her fight for recognition of her mother's contribution to medical science. Deborah is uneducated but passionate. The part where she finds out about her sister and what happened her sister will absolutely ruin you. 

This book will leave you in awe of medical science, outraged at capitalist greed and heartbroken at the poor people at the bottom of society who pay the price. 

I have no plans to read any more non-fiction in the near future my soul couldn't bear the sadness.

• Selected Quotes...

Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer, he told us. But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.

if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin about them takin her cells, now we don’t get a dime. I used to get so mad about that to where it made me sick and I had to take pills. But I don’t got it in me no more to fight. I just want to know who my mother was.

Slowly, a multibillion-dollar industry selling human biological materials was born.

What we do know is that today, Invitrogen sells HeLa products that cost anywhere from $100 to nearly $10,000 per vial. A search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database turns up more than seventeen thousand patents involving HeLa cells. And there’s no way to quantify the professional gain many scientists have achieved with the help of HeLa.

“but they made millions! It’s not fair! She’s the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”

• About The Author...

Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning science writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; and others. She has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s Radiolab and PBS’s NOVA scienceNOW, and is a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine and guest editor of The Best American Science Writing 2011. She is a former Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle and has taught creative nonfiction and science journalism at the University of Memphis, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University. Her debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, took more than ten years to research and write, and became an instant New York Times bestseller. She has been featured on numerous television shows, including CBS Sunday Morning and The Colbert Report. Her book has received widespread critical acclaim, with reviews appearing in The New Yorker, Washington Post, Science, Entertainment Weekly, People, and many others. It won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and was named The Best Book of 2010 by Amazon.com, and a Best Book of the Year by Entertainment Weekly; O, The Oprah Magazine; The New York Times; Washington Post; US News & World Report; and numerous others.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is being translated into more than twenty languages, and adapted into a young adult book, and an HBO film produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball. Skloot lives in Chicago but regularly abandons city life to write in the hills of West Virginia, where she tends to find stray animals and bring them home. She travels extensively to speak about her book. For more information, visit RebeccaSkloot.com, where you will find book special features, including photos and videos, as well as her book tour schedule, and links to follow her and The Immortal Life on Twitter and Facebook.