Her father, unable to look after them all, moved the family to Clover, Virginia, and the children went to live with relatives. Letting people and events speak for themselves, Skloot tells a rich, resonant tale of modern science, the wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit society's most vulnerable people.When she was four, her mother died giving birth to her 10th child. Writing in plain, clear prose, Skloot avoids melodrama and makes no judgments. Skloot's portraits of Deborah, her father and brothers are so vibrant and immediate they recall Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family. What Skloot so poignantly portrays is the devastating impact Henrietta's death and the eventual importance of her cells had on her husband and children. These cells have aided in medical discoveries from the polio vaccine to AIDS treatments. They spawned the first viable, indeed miraculously productive, cell line known as HeLa. Without her knowledge, doctors treating her at Johns Hopkins took tissue samples from her cervix for research. Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black mother of five in Baltimore when she died of cervical cancer in 1951. Science journalist Skloot makes a remarkable debut with this multilayered story about "faith, science, journalism, and grace." It is also a tale of medical wonders and medical arrogance, racism, poverty and the bond that grows, sometimes painfully, between two very different women Skloot and Deborah Lacks sharing an obsession to learn about Deborah's mother, Henrietta, and her magical, immortal cells. 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. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? 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. 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. 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.
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: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review
WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NONFICTION.ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS.ONE OF THE “MOST INFLUENTIAL” (CNN), “DEFINING” ( LITHUB), AND “BEST” ( THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) BOOKS OF THE DECADE.NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE “The story of modern medicine and bioethics-and, indeed, race relations-is refracted beautifully, and movingly.”- Entertainment Weekly.
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