The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is a non-fiction book that tells the story of Lacks and her HeLa cells, or the immortal cell line that doctors retrieved from her cervical cancer cells. Crown Publishing Group published the book in 2010, and it won a National Academies Communication Award the following year. This guide refers to the Crown 2010 first edition.

Henrietta Lacks was a black American woman who died of cancer in 1951 at age 31. Before she died, doctors took a sample from her tumor without her knowledge or consent and used the sample for medical research. The cells in Henrietta’s tissue sample, known as HeLa cells (pronounced hee-lah), were the first human cells to survive in a culture, where they thrived and multiplied. Consequently, HeLa cells have since been used in scientific research all over the world and have played a fundamental role in numerous medical advances and developments, like the polio vaccine.

For over two decades, Henrietta’s identity was unknown, and her family knew nothing about HeLa and the role their mother unknowingly played in medical research. By the 1970s, however, her name was publicly revealed.

When Skloot first hears about Henrietta at college in the 1980s, she is surprised at how little information she learns: “As the other students filed out of the room, I sat thinking, That’s it? That’s all we get? There has to be more to this story” (4). Several years later, in the late 1990s, Skloot comes across the papers from the first HeLa Cancer Control Symposium, which took place in Atlanta in 1996. She persuades the conference’s organizer, Roland Pattillo, to put her in touch with Henrietta’s family, though he warns her to be careful, as the family has suffered greatly as a result of HeLa, and some members of the scientific community have treated them poorly.

Skloot’s call to Pattillo is the beginning of a decade of research in which she becomes determined to give a voice to Henrietta, an unsung and accidental hero of modern medicine. The resulting book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, combines the story of the HeLa cells with that of Henrietta and her family. No one had ever explained to the Lacks family what HeLa cells were and what they were used for; they struggled to reconcile the immortal existence of their mother’s cells with their own religious beliefs; they have had experiences of being misled and patronized by scientists and conmen to exploit them; and some members of the family, who live in poverty and cannot afford health insurance, feel that they are entitled to a share of the vast profits that HeLa has made. Over several years, Skloot forms a relationship with the Lacks family. She becomes particularly close to Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, who desperately wants to learn everything she can about the mother who died when she was just a toddler. Deborah also wants her mother’s story to be told.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a multi-faceted book which moves back and forth between its different strands: Henrietta’s biography, from her childhood to her tragic, early death; the story of her family over several decades; the story of Skloot’s research and her relationship with the Lacks family, particularly Deborah; and the story of the HeLa cells. Consequently, it intertwines a personal family story with an accessible overview of HeLa and cell culture research. The overlap between the Lacks family and the world of scientific research enables Skloot to engage her readers in various debates about scientific ethics, racism, and poverty.