The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

I picked up this book by Rebecca Skloot knowing little more than that it had won a number of prizes and that she was an accomplished science writer.  As a result, I expected it to have a lot more, you know, science writing.  I can't really say I'm disappointed though, because the story is so complex, so well-told, and so deeply human.

If you haven't already heard the quick version, let me explain that Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951.  She was 26 years old.  During her brief treatment for this very aggressive cancer, doctors at Johns Hopkins took samples of her tumors.  These cells turned out to be incredibly hardy.  They multiplied fast and were easy to culture.  As a result, they were widely shared and became the research tool of choice for a generation of doctors and biologists studying cancer or genetics or the effects of radiation or anything else that required a living human cell to tinker with in the lab.  Her cells became a scientific (and hence monetary) goldmine. Unfortunately, nobody told Henrietta, her husband, or her 5 surviving children about what science had done with her insides.  The fact that all of those people were black and poor is definitely not incidental to the story.

There's no sense telling the story in any more detail than that.  Skloot does a great job of covering its many facets in less time than it takes to fly to Texas and back.  Perhaps somewhere over Wichita you will learn some intriguing scientific history that you wish could be explored more thoroughly.  By the time you get to Tulsa you'll have forgotten all about that though, because the star of the story is not really science, but history.  Ultimately it's a book that explores how we deal with the long shadow of the past in our country, our science, and our personal lives.  How do we live this past in our present?  How do we actually sort through it, without minimizing it and without becoming a prisoner of it?  How can the past be empowering?  The fact that the book poses this question on so many levels makes it way more valuable than whatever I was expecting.