And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.Īmazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. 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. 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? 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. 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. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. 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.
#The immortal life of henrietta lacks full
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. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. 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. 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. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. 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. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Visit Huntsman Cancer Institute’s Cancer Learning Center to learn how you can check out The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and find more resources about cancer.Now a major motion picture from HBO® starring Oprah Winfrey and Rose Byrne. It also considers the ethical dilemmas of using patient cells without knowledge or consent, the way race played a part in how Lacks was treated, and the impact on her family decades later. The book introduces us to the woman who helped change modern medicine. Previously, very few people knew the source of HeLa cells. The acclaimed nonfiction book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot tells Henrietta Lacks’s cancer story and the revolutionary research, ethical questions, and racism wrapped up in the use of her cells.
HeLa enabled the development of in vitro fertilization, the first clone of a human cell, the development of the polio vaccine, advances in gene mapping, and more. Named after the first two letters of her first and last name, HeLa cells were used in many different medical experiments because they could be grown so easily in the lab. Gey grew the cells continuously in the lab, something that had never been done before. Because of a mutation, her cells were able to survive and reproduce outside the body. Lacks’s cells ended up in the lab of cell biologist Dr.
The cells were taken without Lacks’s knowledge or consent. Her doctor took two biopsies, one of cancer cells and one of healthy cells. In 1951, a Black woman named Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital to have a doctor look at a “knot” in her womb, which turned out to be cervical cancer.
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