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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot tells the rich, enthralling story of Henrietta Lacks, the forgotten woman behind one of the most important tools in modern medicine, and of Lacks’s descendants, many of whom feel betrayed by the scientific establishment.

Born in 1920 in Clover, Virginia, Henrietta Lacks was a poor tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors. In 1951, she developed a strangely aggressive cancer, and doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took a tissue sample without her knowledge. She died without knowing that her cells would become immortal—the first to grow and survive indefinitely in culture. HeLa cells, as they are called, were essential to developing the polio vaccine. They have aided in the development of in-vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping, and have helped us to better understand the workings of cancer and innumerable viruses. Even today, HeLa is the most widely used cell line in labs worldwide, bought and sold by the billions. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they would weigh more than 50 million metric tons—more than a hundred Empire State Buildings.

After learning about the HeLa cell line in high school, Rebecca Skloot became consumed by curiosity about the woman behind the cells. During the decade it took her to chase down and chronicle this remarkable story, she journeyed from state-of-the-art scientific laboratories to the tobacco fields of southern Virginia to East Baltimore, where the Lacks family lives today. She spent years winning the trust of Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, who longed to know more about her mother and to better understand the science behind her cells, which often seemed more like science fiction. With this book, we too become immersed in the story of the Lacks family, and are shocked to discover that Henrietta’s husband and children did not find out about her “immortality,” or the enormous profits her cells had generated, until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using blood samples from her family in research without informed consent. The family had grown up surrounded by preaching, faith healing, and voodoo; suddenly they were plunged into a world of arcane-sounding science, wrestling with feelings of pride, betrayal, and fear.

While biotech companies had made millions selling HeLa, many of Henrietta’s descendants could not even afford health insurance.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks marks the debut of an outsize new talent in narrative nonfiction. Rebecca Skloot brilliantly weaves together the Lackses’ story—past and present—with the story of the first culturing of HeLa cells, the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, and the birth of bioethics. She combines investigative reporting, crystalline science writing, and riveting narrative. The result is a book that leaves as indelible an impression as Henrietta’s cells.

Excerpt
Deborah grabbed her bag off the floor, and dumped its contents onto the bed. “This is what I got about my mother,” she said. There were videotapes, a tattered English dictionary, a diary, a genetics textbook, many scientific journal articles, patent records, and unsent greeting cards, including several birthday and Mother’s Day cards she’d bought for Henrietta.

While she sorted through the pile, as though she was saying something as everyday as It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, Deborah said, “Scientists do all kinds of experiments and you never know what they doin. I still wonder how many people they got in London walkin around look just like my mother.”

“What?” I said. “Why would there be women in London who look like your mother?”

“They did that cloning on my mother over there,” she said, surprised I hadn’t come across that fact in my research. “A reporter came here from England talking about they cloned a sheep. Now you go on the Internet, they got stuff about cloning my mother all over.” She held up an article from the Independent in London and pointed at a circled paragraph: “Henrietta Lacks’s cells thrived. In weight, they now far surpassed the person of their origin and there would probably be more than sufficient to populate a village of Henriettas.” The writer joked that Henrietta should have put ten dollars in the bank in 1951, because if she had, her clones would be rich now.

Deborah raised her eyebrows at me like, See? I told you!

I started saying it was just Henrietta’s cells scientists had cloned, not Henrietta herself. But Deborah waved her hand in my face, shushing me like I was talking nonsense, then grabbed a videocassette and held it up for me to see. It said Jurassic Park on the spine.

“I saw this movie a bunch of times,” she said. “They talking about the genes and taking them from cells to bring that dinosaur back to life and I’m like, Oh Lord, I got a paper on how they were doin that with my mother’s cells too!

“I don’t know what I’d do if I saw one of my mother clones walkin around somewhere.”

Deborah realized Jurassic Park was science fiction, but for her the line between sci-fi and reality had blurred years earlier, when her father got that first call saying Henrietta’s cells were still alive twenty-five years after her death. Deborah knew her mother’s cells had grown like the Blob until there were so many of them they could wrap around the Earth several times. It sounded crazy, but it was true.

“You just never know,” Deborah said, fishing two more articles from the pile. One was called Human, Plant Cells Fused: Walking Carrots Next? The other was Man-Animal Cells Bred in Lab. Both were about her mother’s cells, and neither was science fiction.

“I don’t know what they did,” Deborah said, “but it all sound like Jurassic Park to me.”

Learn more: www.lacksfamily.com. Purchase the book.

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