The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

(Posted for Ann Roberts) 
 I finally read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot after a detour through The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. I read that one during one of those months that I forgot to blog.  I ordered Calpurnia Tate through MOBIUS, much like I have done with most of the books that I read (I actually use library  services for the purpose of reading) and after reading the first couple of pages, realized it was not the book I thought I had ordered. I read it anyway. You can see why I would have made that mistake, can’t you?  Evolution, immortality, two VERY old-fashioned names-it was a perfectly reasonable mistake. But I digress. 

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is almost one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” stories, or at least it is to me, not being versed in the practices of cell research. Henrietta Lacks was a poor African-American woman whose cancer cells were taken, without her knowledge, in the 1950s by a researcher who was very interested in growing cells in culture, and whose unwitting contribution to science has led to the development of the polio vaccine, provided research cells for cancer research, and assisted scientists in advances in in vitro fertilization, cloning and gene mapping.  These cells, called HeLa cells, are still in production and use today and the quantity of HeLa cells produced over the decades would weigh 50 million metric tons and have been bought and sold by the billions.

The Lacks family, a hardscrabble, inner city Baltimore family, has struggled through the years to understand the usage of their matriarch’s cancer cells, as well as a system which allows medical scientists and drug companies to profit from the use of cells from an individual without consent, while they struggle to maintain health insurance.  Did you know that if you’ve had a mole removed the material that is taken from your body doesn’t automatically get destroyed? According to this author, anyone’s tissues might be sitting in a lab somewhere waiting to be used for some research purpose. The medical community figures if we’ve left it behind, we don’t have any right to it anymore and they might as well use it, and profit from it.  Strange indeed.

At any rate, this book was infinitely better than Calpurnia Tate to me, as am I’m not a fan of books written for teens and tweens at this point in time and space.  I think it has something to do with being over 50 and childless.

369 pages