Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. Rebecca Skloot’s fascinating account is the story of the life, and afterlife, of a woman who changed the world forever.
Truth Stranger Than Fiction
Henrietta Lacks was only 31 when her cervical cancer cells were extracted and cultured by John Hopkins Hospital – without her knowledge or consent. In 1951, these cells began what was the first, and for many years, the only human cell line able to reproduce indefinitely. Known as HeLa cells for Henrietta Lacks, they remain a remarkably durable and prolific source of scientific research.
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. HeLa cells have been vital for developing the polio vaccine; have uncovered the secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in-vitro fertilisation, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.
However Henrietta’s family were not aware of her immortality until more than twenty years after her death, with devastating consequences. 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 in all four corners of the world.
Exploitation And Medical Afterlife
Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. After over a decade of investigation, author Rebecca Skloot takes us on an intimate journey from the “coloured” wards of Johns Hopkins in the 50s to the stark white laboratories full of freezers with HeLa cells; alongside traversing from Henrietta’s fading hometown of Clover, Virginia (a land of wooden quarters for enslaved people, faith healings, and voodoo), to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren still struggle with her lost legacy.
Henrietta’s descendants first learned of her HeLa cells when scientists began using her husband and children in their research without informed consent; In the 1970’s, scientists realised that many types of lab grown cell lines were contaminated and had become a mixture of cells. In order to work out which ones were contaminated, researchers approached the Lacks family for blood samples. Alarmed and distressed at this discovery, genetic information published further down the line had equally negative consequences for them.
Over the course of Rebecca’s investigation, she became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family – especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who has been 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 even afford access to healthcare or insurance?
Although the cells have launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, the Lacks family have never seen any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot shows, their story – past and present – is inextricably connected to the history of experimentation on African Americans, and the birth of bioethics.
The Ethics Of Science
Rebecca first became interested in Lacks at school, after a biology teacher referenced the importance of this pivotal discovery, despite knowing relatively little about the human behind it. Rebecca began conducting extensive research on HeLa and worked with Lacks’ family to compile their stories. She also sourced information from the journal of Deborah Lacks, alongside archival photos and documents, and records of scientific and historical research.
Rebecca narrates the science lucidly, tracking the racial politics of medicine thoughtfully and telling the Lacks family’s often painful history with grace. She also confronts the “spookiness” or “spirit” of the cells themselves, intrepidly crossing into the existential 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;” Rebecca’s debut book is far deeper, braver and more insightful than that.
