The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

 

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot introduces the reader to the one person that has arguably had the greatest impact on modern medicine. Ironically, it is possible that without Skloot working endlessly to get the characters to cooperate, the name Henrietta Lacks and the silent contribution she made may never had been announced to the public. 

The story begins with the illness of a young black woman in Memphis, Henrietta Lacks. While undergoing treatment for an aggressive cancer, tissue is removed for testing and at the same time a portion is sent to the lab for research. Those samples would change medicine forever. Henrietta never gave explicit permission for those samples to be used and through the story we learn this is a normal circumstance. 

While Henrietta is central to what would become know as the HeLa cells that have made so many contributions to medicine, her daughter Deborah is vital to the story. She was a small child when her mother died and had no memories of her. She was somewhat obsessed with knowing her mother and more importantly with protecting her memory. The search for answers brings together an author and a daughter on a quest to really know who Henrietta was. The research introduces readers to other members of the family. The family is under educated and often don't understand the terminologies of the circumstances of Henrietta and her cells. It's interesting to read what they envisioned about the cells and how those cells were used. 

I thought this was an incredibly important story. I wondered as I was reading what role her race placed in her story. Would she have gone unknown for as long as she had if she were a white woman? Was the family treated negatively because they were black? Would more information had been forthcoming if they were educated enough to know what questions to ask. I also considered how their lack of education had made it difficult for them to understand the vastness of medical progress that was a result of Henrietta. Her name should be known.

I would recommend The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot to readers of nonfiction, the sciences and family dynamics. It is a beautiful story of what one woman can do, even if by accident and through tragedy.