Review by Kory Wells
A young African-American mother of five who died in 1951 seems an unlikely hero for anyone living today, but she has likely saved your life, or the life of someone you love, perhaps a few times over. Until recently, you could have never known her name, let alone her story. Even the scientific community, which she’s served for over half a century, has mostly known her by a code name. But now, thanks to author Rebecca Skloot, this woman thrives on the page just as her infamous cells do in the laboratory in the nonfiction book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Henrietta’s cells, harvested from the particularly aggressive cervical cancer which took her life, made history because they were the first to reproduce in a laboratory—and did so with “mythological intensity.” The particular attributes of the “HeLa” cells, as they are called, enabled them to become a “laboratory workhorse” and have furthered tremendous advances in medicine, including chemotherapy, the polio vaccine, gene mapping, cloning, in vitro fertilization and more.
Some readers will appreciate this book purely from its scientific vantage point. Skloot, who has an undergraduate degree in biological sciences and an MFA in creative writing, certainly delivers on that front. While she may include too much science for some, she does an admirable job of making it accessible: “a cell looks a lot like a fried egg,” and freezing a cell is like “pressing a pause button” on cell division, metabolism and more.
Yet this story is not only about science. “I have always thought it was strange,” Henrietta’s daughter Deborah says, “if our mother’s cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors?” As impressive as Henrietta’s immortal cells and their role in medical history are, this one question captured in Deborah’s voice hints at the many layers and complexities of this story: Henrietta’s cells were harvested without compensation or consent. While that fact has troubled her family in various ways over the six decades since her death, the issue at heart remains: storing blood and tissues obtained from diagnostic procedures for research does not require informed consent, even today.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was chosen as a best book of 2010 by more than 60 media outlets, and it was the runner-up as this year’s One Book of Rutherford County selection. While this reviewer would stop short of some of the praise this book has received—The Daily Nebraskan called it “the perfect book”—this is an engaging, justly narrated story, so well-researched over a decade that Skloot herself became a character in it. Whether you read it as a tale of individuals and families, of the disadvantaged and the educated, of race and religion, of trust and anger, of capitalism and consent, or of ethics and ironies, this book is an important view of American culture and global scientific history you’re sure to remember the next time you visit the doctor.
One Book Co-Chair Kory Wells is a poet and long-time Murfreesboro resident. korywells.com
