num_pages: 370
description: 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 enslaved ancestors yet her cellstaken without her knowledgebecame 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 theyd weigh more than 50 million metric tonsas much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer viruses and the atom bombs 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 Henriettas small dying hometown of Clover Virginia  a land of wooden quarters for enslaved people faith healings and voodoo  to East Baltimore today where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.Henriettas 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 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 familyespecially Henriettas daughter Deborah who was devastated to learn about her mothers 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 couldnt 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.
language: English
title: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
publisher: Crown Publishing Group