The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks ~ Rebecca Skloot

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot

I’ve always enjoyed books which teach me something as well as telling a good story.  Usually I find that in fiction books where the author has something to share which they have researched or learned.  With The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a spellbinding story intertwines with both a history and a science lesson. 

The author first heard about HeLa cells when she was 16.  She became fascinated, wondering… who was the woman behind the cells that helped develop the polio vaccine, revolutionized cancer treatment and helped in every endeavor from in virtro fertilization to cloning?  Her search for Henrietta Lacks led her to Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, who had the same questions but many more.  Most of all though, Deborah wanted to know who her mother was.  Together they investigated.

Henrietta Lacks was a thirty year old mother of five in 1951 when she went to Johns Hopkins Hospital and was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cervical cancer.  At that time the treatment involved using radium placed into the uterus to kill the cells.  When the treatment didn’t work, Henrietta died, painfully.  But all of her cells didn’t die with her.  A biopsy of the tumor provided the first cells capable of being kept alive in a lab.  They were named HeLa after her and have gone on to be the basis for many treatments, vaccines and cures but her own family did not know this was taking place until decades later.  The cells were replicated many billions of times over and shared between scientists.  This is the story of those cells and the people Henrietta Lacks left behind, particularly her daughter Deborah.

The author explains the science in an understandable way and tells a compelling story of the humans the science derived from and affected. I actually listened to this book on CD in my car rather than reading it in the paper format.  The two readers are tremendous, making it at once easy to understand and clearly bringing forth the characters so that they are individuals, more in the nature of a radio drama than a book being read.  I would highly recommend it in either format.