author of immortal life of henrietta lacks

She and her father, Floyd Skloot, are co-editors of The Best American Science Writing 2011. She has worked as a correspondent for WNYC’s Radiolab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW. She specializes in narrative science writing and has explored a wide range of topics, including goldfish surgery, tissue ownership rights, race and medicine, food politics, and packs of wild dogs in Manhattan. You may be surprised, as I was, at how many of the issues regarding legality and consent are still unresolved today.Rebecca Skloot is an award winning science writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine O, The Oprah Magazine Discover and many other publications.

I highly recommend taking the time to read this book, which wrestles elegantly with big moral questions around science, race, history, and justice. I not only learned about science and cell research - which in fact helped me to better understand the process that must have occurred in creating a COVID-19 vaccine, in which HeLa was used as a research tool - but also about what a true reconciliation process might look like for a family who history almost forgot. This book powerfully captures the Black community's long-standing distrust in medicine, the ever-present ethical dilemmas of research in regards to consent and compensation, the human cost of ground-breaking medical advances, and one family's navigation of the strange and detached fame of their loved one, who never agreed to being 'immortal' or knew anything about it. 'I always thought it was strange,' says Deborah to Skloot during one of their many long interviews, 'if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can't afford to see no doctors?' And though today a single vial of HeLa cells is sold for $575, the Lacks have never received any portion of the profits.

Nobody from Johns Hopkins - the hospital where Henrietta's cells were taken during an examination just months before her death - ever notified the Lacks family, including the researcher, George Gey, who originally grew her cells and released them to medical researchers across the globe. Skloot spends countless hours with the Lacks family, especially with Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, who was a baby when her mother died and who was haunted by the existence of the cells and the way her family was mistreated throughout the process.ĭespite the importance of HeLa to medical research, the Lacks family had no idea that a part of Henrietta was 'immortal' until twenty years after her death, and they came upon the information by random chance. Divided into three sections - Life, Death, and Immortality - the book meticulously examines everything that Henrietta's life and cells touched, from her birth in 1920 to the book's publication in 2009. Skloot spent ten years researching Henrietta Lacks and HeLa while gaining the trust of the Lacks family to tell their story, which resulted in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a 381-page biography that explains who Henrietta was, who her family is, how they have been impacted by the cells, and how the cells have shaped the world of medical research. But Skloot couldn't find any information about the woman herself, who was often misnamed on websites as Helen Lane. Everyone in science seemed to know all about HeLa and why it was important. HeLa cells have been one of the most important contributions to modern medicine studies on them resulted in the polio vaccine, they were used in AIDS research, and they went up in the first space mission. Author Rebecca Skloot, for her part, first learned of Henrietta when she sixteen years old while taking a biology class at a community college in 1988. We're talking about something so small that several thousand could fit on the head of a pin.īefore reading this book, I had never heard of Henrietta Lacks or HeLa cells. They're still growing today: if you laid down all the cells, known as HeLa, from end to end, they would wrap around the Earth at least three times. Henrietta's cells, instead, thrived and grew and didn't stop growing. Before her death, a researcher took samples of tissue from her cervix without her consent - a common but ethically murky procedure - and was surprised when they didn't die soon-after: the fate of most cells taken for research purposes. In 1951, a Black mother of five named Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer, unaware that the cells from that cancer - a physical piece of her - would go on to live forever.

Author of immortal life of henrietta lacks