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.
Amazon.com Review
Amazon 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

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Amazon 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 Amazon 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

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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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Prologue: The Woman in the Photograph 1

Deborah's Voice 9

Pt. 1 Life

1 The Exam ... 1951 13

2 Clover ... 1920-1942 18

3 Diagnosis and Treatment ... 1951 27

4 The Birth of HeLa ... 1951 34

5 "Blackness Be Spreadin All Inside" ... 1951 42

6 "Lady's on the Phone" ... 1999 49

7 The Death and Life of Cell Culture ... 1951 56

8 "A Miserable Specimen" ... 1951 63

9 Turner Station ... 1999 67

10 The Other Side of the Tracks ... 1999 77

11 "The Devil of Pain Itself" ... 1951 83

Pt. 2 Death

12 The Storm ... 1951 89

13 The HeLa Factory ... 1951-1953 93

14 Helen Lane ... 1953-1954 105

15 "Too Young to Remember" ... 1951-1965 110

16 "Spending Eternity in the Same Place" ... 1999 118

17 Illegal, Immoral, and Deplorable ... 1954-1966 127

18 "Strangest Hybrid" ... 1960-1966 137

19 "The Most Critical Time on This Earth Is Now" ... 1966-1973 144

20 The HeLa Bomb 1966 152

21 Night Doctors 2000 158

22 "The Fame She So Richly Deserves" ... 1970-1973 170

Pt. 3 Immortality

23 "It's Alive" ... 1973-1974 179

24 "Least They Can Do" ... 1975 191

25 "Who Told You You Could Sell My Spleen?" ... 1976-1988 199

26 Breach of Privacy ... 1980-1985 207

27 The Secret of Immortality ... 1984-1995 212

28 After London ... 1996-1999 218

29 A Village of Henriettas ... 2000 232

30 Zakariyya ... 2000 241

31 Hela, Goddess of Death ... 2000-2001 250

32 "All That's My Mother" ... 2001 259

33 The Hospital for the Negro Insane ... 2001 268

34 The Medical Records ... 2001 279

35 Soul Cleansing ... 2001 286

36 Heavenly Bodies ... 2001 294

37 "Nothing to Be Scared About" ... 2001 297

38 The Long Road to Clover ... 2009 305

Where They Are Now311

Afterword 315

Acknowledgments 329

Notes 338

Index 359