The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

What a wonderful story of a lady who was taken much too early. The inheritance she left to the world is incalculable. Beautifully written, factual without reading like text book. Her family still coming to terms with a situation that most humans would find complex and her daughter Deborah, the matriarch, finally understanding in her own way all the issues that abounded the great and late Henrietta Lacks.

I did struggle with this book - a lot. It is very well written and well presented, but the subject is hard to take. The moral question about who owns cells once they are taken from a body is a tough one, particularly in this case where the cells in question have had such a massive influence within the medical world. I'm not sure what the solution is, but the anguish and outrage of the family involved here is palpable. This is an interesting but distressing book to read, and although it was informative, I couldn't truthfully say I 'enjoyed' it. But then, its purpose is to inform and educate and it does that very well. It left me thoughtful and sadder, but wiser.

I'm about a quarter of the way through this book and am finding it fascinating. It's a great mix of pop science and biography (of multiple people). It's a really easy read and I don't want to put it down. I'd recommend it to anyone with any interest in people and how we work socially and biologically.

This is the story about Henrietta Lacks and her contribution to the medical industry. Some of her cells were taken and found to have very unusual properties and they have been used for over 70 years to help the medical industry test drugs and treatments. This book looks at her life, the person she was, her cancer treatment and the developments that came after her cells were tested. This is a moving and very interesting book. If you have any kind of medical interest, you will definitely enjoy this as you probably have read about her, but under a different name.

If this was the plot of a novel, you would probably not buy the book. The whole idea is 'out there' so to speak, i.e. that a woman called Henrietta Lacks had cells taken from her body whilst she is treated for cancer and now years later cells from her have been grown and are sold all across the world as the baseline for cancer research and has been responsible for much progress. Henrietta Lacks (HeLa) is technically immortal. As though that were not enough her surviving family don't understand what is going on, receive no benefit and are ignored by the scientific community. This book both gives the science and more importantly relates the author's journey to find the relatives and explain to them what is happening. Eventually she finds the family and has to deal with their lack of education and ignorance but eventually manages to help them understand what has taken place. One of the many injustices is that no-one has ever bothered with the family, and to a large extent they are viewed as not important and depersonalised by the scientific community as much as Henrietta herself is. Even with the above this still sounds entirely unlikely, but I well recommend this book to the reader.

A human cell sample ends up being used in thousands of experiments, one cell line from one human, hundreds of tons in weight. This book is everything that surrounds those experiments. I watched Adam Curtis' film "The Way of All Flesh", a brilliant story. This book is so much more. It gives you the human life surrounding these immortal cells. It's road trip, a study in racism and poverty, a historical narrative, reportage, it's a bit of everything. The author spent a decade on this book, with most of the protagonists now dead, you'll never get a better portrayal of these extraordinary events. If you have any interest in cancer research, racism and the African-American, medical and scientific research and it's ethics this is the book for you. It's even a summer blockbuster read for the beach, an enthralling page-turner. Another example of great popular reportage that easily pushes into the bestseller mainstream. This will surely be on the lists of many book clubs, a story that needs to be read by the general public. Any negatives are minor; the lack of photographs (especially of vanished towns and it's residents), too populist perhaps (Skloot becomes part of the story, very personally involved especially with Deborah). These minor 'faults' can be easily forgiven for such a detailed story told with such devotion. This is a story Skloot wanted to tell, not knock out a bestseller.

Memorable is all i can say, I couldnt put the book down Thank you Ms Lacks, thank you the Lacks family for speaking about your experience with science, and unscrupulous doctors, specialists and dodgy media types This book is inspiring, harrowing, heavy in loads of chapters, I shed tears , shouted with joy and anger Ms Skoolt the author is on point with this book and the late Ms Debbie Lacks -Ms Lacks' daughter may your soul finally rest in peace, your family has gone through the firestorm and back and for that we - the people of the world, stand with you and are humbled...The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

One can definitely understand why this book took 10 years to research. Rebecca Skloot leaves no stone unturned in this comprehensive biography. The story describes not only the history of a cell line that helped to transform some of the deadliest diseases, but also chronicles the short life of the heroine, Henrietta Lacks and the impact and legacy that the research had on her family - who were never truly informed until very late on about the research that was done what it actually meant. The author describes the history of this type of research, the ethics, and the technical aspects in a highly accessible way. The other engaging aspect, is that the whole book is written from the perspective of the author and her research, which, in itself makes a great read. I picked up this book wanting to learn some more about the HL cell line having learned about it for my undergrad degree. I had no idea how moved I would be by this amazing story surrounding the family and people connected to Henrietta Lacks.

This is a wonderfully pieced together work, charting the scientific development of the HeLa cell-line as well as the story behind the cells - that of the family of Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cells where taken without consent to become one of the great scientific advancements of the second half of the 20th century. Well researched and with a gentleness of touch that evokes great feelings of sympathy and empathy with the family the story intrigues and informs as much as it entertains. As well as the familial and scientific stories, the book also acts as social history of the USA during the past 50 years, particularly in terms of how that country deals with issues of ethnicity but also in terms of other issues, such as mental health and the proprietary rights of one's own body. A thoroughly engaging read and highly recommended.

I tore through this one. Henrietta Lacks was a poor black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital took samples of her tumour, and from that they quickly developed the first immortal cell line. Henrietta's cells, known as HeLa, have been cultured and used extensively in medical research ever since, and are still alive in their billions to this day. However, Henrietta's family knew nothing of all this until the 1970s. Her children, poor, troubled and poorly educated, learned of the cells through the media, and struggled to comprehend how their mother could still be in some sense alive - used for testing nuclear bombs, curing polio and flying into space. She had never given permission for her tissues to be used, nor had she or any of her children seen a dime from the millions of dollars earned by supplying laboratories the world over with her cells. Rebecca Skloot has spent many years investigating every detail of this human and scientific story (leading to 9 pages of Acknowledgements!). She tells us everything known about Henrietta, details her vast, unknowing contribution to medicine and genetics, and then moves on to her own long, respectful but dogged efforts to gain the trust of Henrietta Lacks' children. They are well-named: they lack education, money, stability and, especially, information. At the heart of the book is Skloot's careful and sensitive friendship with Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, who struggles hard against her own neuroses, ignorance and ill-health to learn about her mother's fate and come to terms with it. The cavalier way in which the family was treated by the doctors and scientists, albeit unwittingly, illuminates the many and difficult ethical questions surrounding the use of human tissues in research. (An Afterword brings us up to date on the present state of law and practice in this area; and there are also extensive notes and an index.) This then is a human interest story as much as it is a scientific one: it's about where the rubber meets the road, where the good intentions and cool abstractions of science intersect with, and disconnect from, the concerns of the people it sets out to help. Simultaneously it depicts the lives of the poor: confused, powerless, angry, distressed, often filled with violence and abuse. It's a compelling book, meticulous, thoughtful and moving, and a long overdue headstone to perhaps the most important unimportant woman who ever lived.