| Immortality for the Woman Behind the Cells |
March 29, 2010
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is just as good as everyone (The New York Times, Science magazine, Publishers Weekly, Washington Post, Boston Globe, etc) says it is. It is the riveting story of a young mother who went to the public ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital complaining of a lump inside her body and ended up providing, without her knowledge or consent, the most famous cells in the world, the HeLa cells. HeLa cells have been used to create the polio vaccine and find cures for cancers; the cells have been taken to outer space, subjected to radiation and viruses, and used for gene mapping research. The cells have been bought and sold by the billions, with profit for many -- but never for Henrietta or her family.
The fact that Henrietta was black, poor, and from the South had no bearing on the virulence of her cancer cells, their strength or their endurance, but it had just about everything to do with how her cells were obtained in the first place and how they were cultured, used, bartered, and sold worldwide for two decades before her closest family even knew the cells existed. Everyone from her husband to her children to her siblings believed Henrietta Lacks, every bit and piece of her, heart, soul, and cells, died of cervical cancer on October 4, 1951. It was not until a news story came out twenty years after her death that her family learned the truth: a part of their wife, sister, and mother still lived on, in millions and millions of cells grown from her cancerous cervical cells.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is so many books in one: it is a mystery, a family portrait, a detailed journey of discovery, both for young writer Rebecca Skloot and for Henrietta's youngest daughter, Deborah; it is a medical history; a sociological study of a neighborhood, Turners Point, in Baltimore; and a haunting evocation of a tiny town deep in rural Maryland, two steps away from slavery and one step away from oblivion. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a lesson in biology, and an ethical treatise on the questions of informed consent and of who owns cells taken from a person for biopsy, research, or storage. Court cases have been fighting out the issue of tissue ownership, medical institutions have created guidelines, and patient rights groups have written proposed rules for ratification, but no clear law governs the question. At least laws governing informed consent are now firmly in place (relatively recently, I was surprised to discover and spurred by the findings of the Nuremberg trials as to how Nazi doctors used concentration camp inmates for experiments and research).
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is fascinating, riveting, stomach-turning, and heart-breaking, yet it is never melodramatic, never veers from the facts, and never flinches from the truth. It is a great book with many great women involved: Henrietta Lacks, brave and vulnerable, Rebecca Skloot, brave and curious, Bobbette Lacks, brave and angry, and Deborah Lacks, brave and lonely.
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