The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks »

REBECCA SKLOOT is a science writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; Prevention; Glamour; and others. She has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s Radio Lab and PBS’s NOVA scienceNow, and is a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine. Her work has been anthologized in several collections, including The Best Food Writing and The Best Creative Nonfiction. She is a former vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, and has taught nonfiction in the creative writing programs at the University of Memphis and the University of Pittsburgh, and science journalism at New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program. She blogs about science, life, and writing at Culture Dish, hosted by Seed magazine. This is her first book. For more information, visit her website at RebeccaSkloot.com.

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.

The Washington Post - Eric Roston

Skloot's vivid account…reads like a novel. The prose is unadorned, crisp and transparent…This book, labeled "science--cultural studies," should be treated as a work of American history. It's a deftly crafted investigation of a social wrong committed by the medical establishment, as well as the scientific and medical miracles to which it led. Skloot's compassionate account can be the first step toward recognition, justice and healing.

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