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Biographies & Memoirs |
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
written by Rebecca Skloot
Studio : Random House Audio
by Random House Audio
Release Date : 2010-02-02
Publisher : Random House Audio
Released : 2010-02-02
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 10
EAN : 9780307712509
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 314 reviews)
List Price : $35.00
Our Price : $20.26
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ISBN13: 9780307712509
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Condition: New
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Product 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 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. |
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Harvardbooksellers.com Review |
Harvardbooksellers Best Books of the Month, February 2010: From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive--even thrive--in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta's family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution--and her cells' strange survival--left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories? --Tom Nissley
Harvardbooksellers Exclusive: Jad Abumrad Reviews The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Jad Abumrad is host and creator of the public radio hit Radiolab, now in its seventh season and reaching over a million people monthly. Radiolab combines cutting-edge production with a philosophical approach to big ideas in science and beyond, and an inventive method of storytelling. Abumrad has won numerous awards, including a National Headliner Award in Radio and an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science Journalism Award. Read his exclusive Harvardbooksellers guest review of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks:
Honestly, I can't imagine a better tale. A detective story that's at once mythically large and painfully intimate. Just the simple facts are hard to believe: that in 1951, a poor black woman named Henrietta Lacks dies of cervical cancer, but pieces of the tumor that killed her--taken without her knowledge or consent--live on, first in one lab, then in hundreds, then thousands, then in giant factories churning out polio vaccines, then aboard rocket ships launched into space. The cells from this one tumor would spawn a multi-billion dollar industry and become a foundation of modern science--leading to breakthroughs in gene mapping, cloning and fertility and helping to discover how viruses work and how cancer develops (among a million other things). All of which is to say: the science end of this story is enough to blow one's mind right out of one's face. But what's truly remarkable about Rebecca Skloot's book is that we also get the rest of the story, the part that could have easily remained hidden had she not spent ten years unearthing it: Who was Henrietta Lacks? How did she live? How she did die? Did her family know that she'd become, in some sense, immortal, and how did that affect them? These are crucial questions, because science should never forget the people who gave it life. And so, what unfolds is not only a reporting tour de force but also a very entertaining account of Henrietta, her ancestors, her cells and the scientists who grew them. The book ultimately channels its journey of discovery though Henrietta's youngest daughter, Deborah, who never knew her mother, and who dreamt of one day being a scientist. As Deborah Lacks and Skloot search for answers, we're bounced effortlessly from the tiny tobacco-farming Virginia hamlet of Henrietta's childhood to modern-day Baltimore, where Henrietta's family remains. Along the way, a series of unforgettable juxtapositions: cell culturing bumps into faith healings, cutting edge medicine collides with the dark truth that Henrietta's family can't afford the health insurance to care for diseases their mother's cells have helped to cure. Rebecca Skloot tells the story with great sensitivity, urgency and, in the end, damn fine writing. I highly recommend this book. --Jad Abumrad
Look Inside The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Click on thumbnails for larger images  |  |  |  |  | | Henrietta and David Lacks, circa 1945. | Elsie Lacks, Henrietta’s older daughter, about five years before she was committed to Crownsville State Hospital, with a diagnosis of “idiocy.” | Deborah Lacks at about age four. | The home-house where Henrietta was raised, a four-room log cabin in Clover, Virginia, that once served as slave quarters. (1999) | Main Street in downtown Clover, Virginia, where Henrietta was raised, circa 1930s. |
 |  |  |  |  | | Margaret Gey and Minnie, a lab technician, in the Gey lab at Hopkins, circa 1951. | Deborah with her children, LaTonya and Alfred, and her second husband, James Pullum, in the mid-1980s. | In 2001, Deborah developed a severe case of hives after learning upsetting new information about her mother and sister. | Deborah and her cousin Gary Lacks standing in front of drying tobacco, 2001. | The Lacks family in 2009. |
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks |
This amazing book of non-fiction by Rebecca Skloot reads like a great novel. And it seems like a science fiction tale. A poor uneducated 31 year old mother of five dies of an extremely aggressive cervical cancer in the charity ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951. Most of her family does not even know that she is being treated for cancer. During one operation, a section of tissue is given to another doctor in the hospital to culture. When the cells began to grow and multiply, an industry is born.
To add to the drama, the family of Henrietta Lacks has no idea that a tissue sample has been taken from her. Henrietta's cells are used to develop the polio vaccine; to investigate cancer; to develop in vitro fertilization and many other medical advances. Not only was her family not informed of the multi-million dollar industry that developed around the growth and sale of Henrietta's cells, they themselves were uneducated, poor, and lacked access to adequate medical care.
Her children grew up without their mother. The youngest two have no memory of her. One of her daughters died alone at the age of fifteen in a state institution. When her family learned of the culturing and sale of Henrietta's cells, they lacked the knowledge to even understand what a cell was.
Skloot has done years of research to write this book, and yet it reads like a drama. She doesn't sensationalize anything and, most importantly, treats the family with the respect they deserve. Skloot discusses the legalities of tissue ownership rights and mentions a number of other cases where individuals have tried to claim the rights to their own tissue.
There is a tremendous of information in this book, and yet the real person that was Henrietta shines through. This book is a must read. |
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Putting a Face on HeLa |
Despite my years of studying and teaching math and science, I am always caught off guard when I discover I missed an important story. Granted, my expertise is in physics and math. Still, after reading about Henrietta Lacks, I am surprised at how such a discovery could have eluded my attention for so long. Fortunately, Rebecca Skloot's book has rectified that omission.
How many advances in medicine over the course of the last half century have depended upon the use of cultured cells? Their use in drug trials, radiation tests, fundamental cell research (like the discoveries of chromosomes and DNA), and more, is crucial to the advancement of our understanding. Yet it was not that long ago that many scientists despaired of ever finding human cells that would survive being cultured. That all changed in 1951 when a tissue sample was taken from a tumor on the cervix of Henrietta Lacks, and the HeLa cell line was born.
It seems like a story that wouldn't necessarily take an entire book to tell; however, Ms. Lacks story is one of murky medical ethics with which we still struggle. Ill during a time when medical experimentation was often done on people without their understanding or consent, this problem was particularly bad in the African-American community--think of the Tuskegee syphilis study. And though there seems to be no evidence that the doctors at Johns Hopkins didn't do everything possible at the time to save Ms. Lacks from her particularly virulent cancer (a quality that made those cells able to survive in culture), it is also true that the sample was taken without informed consent and many millions of dollars have been made selling her cells while her descendents have never seen a dime and struggle in poverty. It begs the question that we still haven't sufficiently answered: who has the rights over your body tissues once they leave your body?
But do not be fooled: this is not a book of dry history and medical ethics. It is a dynamic story of people and science. We learn about Ms. Lacks and her descendents; in particular, her daughter, Deborah, who wants so much to know the mother she lost and see her mother recognized for what she contributed to science. We meet the scientists who worked so hard to come up with cultured cells in the first half of the 20th century. And we get to know the author, Ms. Skloot, who herself becomes a part of the story she is telling.
What we end up with is a very readable account that puts a face on the scientific shorthand. HeLa is Henrietta Lacks. Overwhelmed by the magnitude of scientific advance these days, it is easy to forget the ethical murkiness that brought about many of these triumphs and the people who were crucial to that success, test subjects and patients put aside and forgotten. Ms. Skloot has done us a great service in her long pursuit of this story. |
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Wow... |
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This is an amazing book. I am so happy that I've read it. This is a book that anyone struggling with chronic illness should read. I read through the first half of the bok within a day, tehn I had to set it down for a few days so I could digest everything that I had just read. Great book. |
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Humanizing medical research |
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Author writes lucidly and brings to life Henrietta Lacks, the source of HeLa cells. Rebecca Skloot's first book is a winner. I couldn't put it down. She explains the science of tissue culture and weaves into it the story of a black family and their trials and the injustices they suffered. |
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wonderfully addictive and spellbinding |
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from the first page I was hooked and stayed up too late many a night because I didn't want to put it down. |
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