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Stock photo  | The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks : Rebecca Skloot (Audio, 2010)
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| Synopsis When Henrietta Lacks, a poor African-American tobacco field worker, died from cancer in 1951, she was buried in an unmarked grave. Unbeknownst to her family, doctors had harvested tissue samples from her body without permission. These cells would become the remarkable HeLa cells--the first human cells reproduced in a laboratory--and would be used for scientific research on cancer cures, radiation therapy, gene mapping, and AIDS. Millions of tons of HeLa cells have been created over the decades, all part of a billion dollar medical market--a harsh irony to some of Lacks's children who cannot afford health insurance. THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS is more than just an astonishing scientific story; it is also the history of the practice of unethical medical testing on African-Americans. Journalist Rebecca Skloot wonderfully brings to life the strange intersections of science, politics, and social justice. Selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2010 Top 10 Book and by the New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 2010.
Publisher's Note Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. 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, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. 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. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. 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. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. 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. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? 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. From the Hardcover edition. Industry Reviews (01/31/2010) (12/01/2009) (09/28/2009) (02/07/2010) (01/31/2010) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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