The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Book Review

The author of this book, Rebecca Skloot, has always been obsessed with Henrietta Lacks, the African-American woman whose cancer cells were harvested in 1951 and used to without Henrietta's knowledge and which "became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the Polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more."  She then endeavors to interview the Lacks family members.

Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer, sought help in 1951 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for what she called a "knot" on her cervix. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer and treated with radium and x-ray therapy.

In the process, some of the tissue was removed from her tumor and sent down to George Gey's lab at Hopkins to be cultured in test tubes. Gey was the head of the tissue culture department at Hopkins and he'd been trying for years to get cells to "divide continuously and infinitely in the lab so that the scientific community could have an inexhaustible supply of human cells to experiment on."

Neither Henrietta nor any of her family members knew about the tissue sample—and neither Gey nor Hopkins ever informed them. They didn't inform them even after the cells began to grow amazingly fast and Gey and the rest of the scientific world realized they'd just made a gigantic breakthrough in medical technology.

Maybe it wouldn't have meant anything to the Lacks family, who were poor, uneducated and extremely nervous of the medical community. They had to focus on Henrietta, whose cancer cells were spreading.  She died at the age of 31, leaving behind a husband and five young children, and sadly, the family from there on continues to decline in a sadly stereotypical fashion of a poor black family.

When reading this book you find yourself stepping in to the lives of a family that is so dysfunctional that it's hard to relate. There's abuse, both sexual and physical, there's pure apathy, drug abuse, ignorance...and yet their story is so real you can't help but be sucked in and outraged by the indecencies, the lack of compassion and services given, the difficulties endured by living below the poverty level. Besides being intrigued by the whole medical process, this story is so much more about the unfairness of living in one of the wealthiest nations and being at the very opposite end of the spectrum. Every person is entitled to basic healthcare, and yet, it doesn't happen. 

In the end, the author and other sympathetic doctors and researchers were able to answer the Lacks family's questions about Henrietta and her contributions to science since her death. Although she can't force the scientific community to make reparations to the Lacks family, the author, Skloot, created a foundation to help the family financially. This story is amazing because without it, most people would not even know the sad but amazing history behind one of the worlds greatest public health success stories.