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A review by edh
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
5.0
When Henrietta Lacks died in 1951, she didn't take everything with her. The doctors at Johns Hopkins took samples of her cancerous cervical tissue and turned them over to researchers, who discovered their amazing properties - HeLa, as the cells were named, became the first immortal cell line. Samples of the hardy cells were shipped all over the world, and for the first time incredibly advanced scientific research became possible. From the polio vaccine to space exploration to atomic bomb experiments, HeLa cells are seemingly omnipresent in a way Henrietta would never be... especially for her own children.
Henrietta's family was terribly afflicted by her swift and tragic death. They would not know that their mother's cancer had been transformed into an almost magical way to perform experiments and test treatments. Those treatments would be nothing her impoverished family could afford, even in their later years. As the story grows, it becomes ethically thorny and makes the reader confront issues like informed consent, patient confidentiality, the racially segregated medical profession of the 1950s and 60s, and the difference education can make when it comes to health care decisions. The author eventually makes significant contact with Henrietta's youngest surviving daughter, Deborah, and attempts to answer the question that both science, the public, and even Deborah herself find difficult to answer: who was(is) Henrietta Lacks?
It's a highly readable book, a fascinating journey into one private American family's experience with the public face of medicine. The effect that Henrietta's cells have had on science over the last 59 years has literally transformed the limits of knowledge about the human body, yet her family was never compensated for the billion-dollar business that HeLa cell lines drive even to this very day. This is the piece of nonfiction that everyone will be talking about in 2010.
I decided to read this book on my phone using my Kindle app, and it was a great way to take Henrietta's story with me wherever I went... because I could NOT put this book down!
Henrietta's family was terribly afflicted by her swift and tragic death. They would not know that their mother's cancer had been transformed into an almost magical way to perform experiments and test treatments. Those treatments would be nothing her impoverished family could afford, even in their later years. As the story grows, it becomes ethically thorny and makes the reader confront issues like informed consent, patient confidentiality, the racially segregated medical profession of the 1950s and 60s, and the difference education can make when it comes to health care decisions. The author eventually makes significant contact with Henrietta's youngest surviving daughter, Deborah, and attempts to answer the question that both science, the public, and even Deborah herself find difficult to answer: who was(is) Henrietta Lacks?
It's a highly readable book, a fascinating journey into one private American family's experience with the public face of medicine. The effect that Henrietta's cells have had on science over the last 59 years has literally transformed the limits of knowledge about the human body, yet her family was never compensated for the billion-dollar business that HeLa cell lines drive even to this very day. This is the piece of nonfiction that everyone will be talking about in 2010.
I decided to read this book on my phone using my Kindle app, and it was a great way to take Henrietta's story with me wherever I went... because I could NOT put this book down!