The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Book Review
If you haven’t yet read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I highly recommend you add it to you TBR. I read it back in January and have since been recommending it to all of my friends.
Henrietta Lacks’s cells have been used in medicine for over 60 years. As the most researched and tested human cells in existence, they’ve been used to help develop vaccines, uncover new developments in the fight against cancer and even been utilized for in vitro fertilization and cloning. Yet until this book was written, the woman behind the famous “HeLa” cells was virtually unknown.
The book tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor tobacco farmer who lived and worked on the same land as her slave ancestors. Despite the fact that Henrietta’s cells have changed the face of medicine and science and launched a multimillion-dollar industry, her family still lives in near poverty. Her family never gave consent to the use of her cells for medical research and didn’t even learn about the “immortal” HeLa cells until 20 years after Henrietta’s death. The story of Henrietta and her descendants reveals a dark history of medical experimentation on African Americans and raises the moral and legal question of whether or not we own our biological material.
The author, a white journalist, spent a decade trying to uncover and write Henrietta’s story. During that time, she became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family, which makes for an interesting addition to the book and shines a light on race relations in America.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 5 stars
