The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Welcome back to another great year of reading at The Peck School.  I read a lot of really wonderful books over the summer, some of which I will discuss on this blog this year!  If you look on the right side of this page, you will see a complete list of the books that I will highlight each month this school year.  I encourage you to read them, and offer your thoughts in the comment section below each entry.  You can also see posts from last year if you are looking for more great books to read!

I am going to start off the year with an amazing work of nonfiction.  The extraordinary thing about this book is, even though it delves deeply into medical ethics, biology, and cell culture, it reads like a novel.  Don't let the heavy scientific nature of this work scare you off.  Scientific writer Rebecca Skloot spent 10 years doing the research for this book.  While the scientific nature of the book is important, Skloot bring forth the very human side of the story of the "HeLa" cell culture line.  With this book, Henrietta Lacks is finally getting the recognition she deserves for her contribution to science and the great sacrifice she made.  See a full description below, and enjoy this wonderful book!

From the Publisher:

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 Lackscaptures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.