- The immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot how to#
- The immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot series#
The critics agree: not long after its release, The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks was named one of the best books of the year by over sixty different media outlets, including the New York Times, NPR, and Oprah. Skloot has done a great thing in bringing it to the world.
Henrietta’s legacy – her cells, her life, and what the medical field did to her family – is profoundly sad, but also moving and powerful. Skloot doesn’t rely on gimmicks or cliffhangers the real story is enticing enough to have you wondering what will happen next (in Henrietta’s life, and in Skloot’s quest to learn about it) all on its own. The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks is very just-one-more-chapter-y. I was shocked to learn that what happened to Henrietta and her family could quite easily, and legally, still happen today!) (Hot tip: don’t skip the Afterword! It offers fascinating insight into the current-ish state of human tissue research, regarding collection, consent, and commercialisation.
So, The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks is just as much a study of bioethics and law as it is the story of the woman before the cells. They’ve been screwed by journalists, con-men, and the doctors they were supposed to trust. Even though their matriarch’s cells have become a multi-million dollar industry, they can’t afford health insurance. Henrietta’s own family knew nothing of her “immortal” cell line until two decades after her death. Skloot followed her nose, learned everything she could and went searching for more – that research became The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks, the definitive true story of one of the most important women the world doesn’t know. Rebecca Skloot only heard about her by chance, when a biology teacher mentioned her in a class.
The immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot series#
According to Skloot, if you could put all of the HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh 50 million metric tonnes (that’s 100 Empire State Buildings).Īnd yet, through a bizarre and tragic series of events, most people have no idea who she is. So, the immortality isn’t (just) metaphorical: there are literally trillions of living HeLa cells in laboratories all around the world, as you read this right now. They’re still growing today, even though Henrietta has been dead for seventy-plus years. Henrietta’s cancer cells (now known in scientific circles as HeLa, taken from the first two letters of her first name and surname) are – as the title of this book suggests – immortal. That’s incredible enough on its own – they took cells out of her body and the cells kept growing – but it’s just the beginning. Henrietta was just one in a long, long, long(!) line of patients whose cells were harvested to see if they might grow – but hers were the first that did.
They’d stick them in some jelly, wait a bit, and watch them die off, time and again.
The immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot how to#
While undergoing treatment at John Hopkins, her cancer cells were taken – without her knowledge – and used to create the first ever “immortal” human tissue grown in culture.ĭon’t worry if you don’t understand exactly what that means: Skloot explains it, a couple of times over, the for-dummies version that even people who hated high-school biology can comprehend.īasically, before Henrietta’s cancer cells were stuck in a test tube, scientists didn’t know how to make cells grow outside of the human body. She sadly developed cervical cancer in the prime of her life. Henrietta Lacks was a poor, black, Southern tobacco farmer, still working the land upon which her ancestors were enslaved. (If you do, you’ll earn my immortal gratitude – as an affiliate, I earn a small commission.)įor those of us unfamiliar with the life of Henrietta Lacks (which I’d imagine is most of us, if you haven’t read this book yet), here’s the run-down. Buy The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks here.
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