Search advanced search
 
Books
Search:
x dismiss this message

Did you know you can edit this page?

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
  • Rated 0 stars
Read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) (edit title/settings)

by Rebecca Skloot (Author) (edit contributors)

Share this book on:
see page history

Description edit see section history

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... read more

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

  • - How the cells of Henrietta Lacks have been used by scientists for research over the decades.
  • - A pivotal moment in medical history and the story of the woman whose cells made a difference to millions.
  • - History of stolen cells without which scientific research be very antiquated.
  • - Amazing view of scientific research and how one woman's cells changed the world.
  • - Finality

Summary edit see section history

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... read more

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.

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.

People edit see section history

  • Henrietta Lacks: The subject of this book, born Loretta Pleasant. Henrietta was alive from 1920 to 1951. She died of cervical cancer when she was only 31 years old. Cells from her cancerous tumor (HeLa, named after Henrietta) were unique and used to further medical vaccines and other medical research.
  • Dr. George Gey: Using Henrietta's cells provided by Dr. Wharton, Dr. Gey was responsible for developing the strand of immortal cells that became known as HeLa.
  • Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr.: Henrietta's surgeon who, unbeknownst to Henrietta or her family, took a sample of her cancerous cervix cells and sent them to Dr. Gey for his study.
  • Deborah "Dale" Lacks: Henrietta and Day's fourth child.
  • Lawrence Lacks: Henrietta and Day's firstborn child.
  • David Jr. "Sonny" Lacks: Henrietta and Day's third child.
  • Elsie Lacks (born Lucille Elsie Pleasant): Henrietta's second-born and eldest daughter. She was institutionalized due to epilepsy and died at age 15.
  • Crazy Joe Grinnan: Henrietta's cousin.
  • Johnny Pleasant: Henrietta's father.
  • David "Day" Lacks: Henrietta's husband and cousin.
  • Walter Nelson-Rees: Geneticist who published the names of cell lines contaminated by HeLa.
  • Courtney "Mama" Speed: Owner of Speed's Grocer in Turner Station. She has tried to set up a museum in honor of Henrietta Lacks.
  • Bobbette Lacks: Lawrence Lacks' wife.
  • Michael Rogers: Rolling Stone reporter who wrote an article about Henrietta Lacks.
  • Stanley Gartler: Scientist that discovered that many cell lines had been contaminated by HeLa.
  • Susan Hsu: Postdoctoral student working for Victor McKusick.
  • Miss Rebecca: The author also becomes a character in the story when she befriends one of Henrietta's daughters.
  • Michael Gold: Author of "A Consipracy of Cells" in which he published information from Henrietta Lacks's medical records.
  • Sir Lord Keenan Kester Cofield: An ex-conman who tried to defraud the Lacks family.
  • Sadie: Henrietta's cousin.
  • Christoph Lengauer: Researcher using HeLa cells who showed Henrietta's family her cells for the first time.
  • Margaret Gey: Wife of Dr. Gey and surgical nurse. Worked with Dr. Key to try and grow cells outside the human body.
  • Gladys Lacks: Henrietta's sister who disapproved of Henrietta's marriage to Day.
  • Gary Lacks: Deborah Lacks's cousin in Clover.
  • Victor Mckusick: Geneticist who took samples of blood from the Lacks children to study more about HeLa.
  • Ethel: Abusive aunt that raised the younger Lacks children after their mother died.
  • Leonard Hayflick: May 9, 2012 Book Club
  • John L. Moore: A cancer patient who unsuccessfully sued his doctor over the use of his cells.
  • James Pullum: Deborah/Dale's husband. A minister.
  • Little Alfred: Deborah's grandson.
  • Davon Meade: Deborah's grandson.
  • Eliza Lacks Pleasant: Henrietta's mother who died when she was young.
  • Cheetah: Deborah's first husband who fathered her two children.
Show all 33 characters
Popular Covers

Loading covers…

Choose your book’s cover

Quotes edit see section history

  • “"This child will someday know that her great-grandmother Henrietta helped the world! So will that child...and that child...and that child. This is their story now. They need to take hold of it and let it teach them they can change the world too."”
    James Pullum (Henrietta's daughter Deborah's second husband
  • “Today, nearly 60 years after Henrietta's death, her body lies in an unmarked grave in Clover, Virginia. But her cells are still among the most widely used in labs worldwide—bought and sold by the billions. Though those cells have done wonders for science, Henrietta—whose legacy involves the birth of bioethics and the grim history of experimentation on African-Americans—is all but forgotten.”
  • “Pounding in the back of their heads was a gnawing feeling that science and the press had taken advantage of them.”
  • “When an editor who insisted I take the Lacks family out of the book was injured in a mysterious accident, Deborah said that's what happens when you piss Henrietta off.”
  • “Like the Bible said . . . man brought nothing into this world and he'll carry nothing out. Sometime we care about stuff too much. We worry when there's nothing to worry about."”
    Gary Lacks
  • “We'd form a deep personal bond, and slowly, without realizing it, I'd become a character in her story, and she in mine."”
    Rebecca Skloot in speaking about Deborah Lacks
  • “After writing "HeLa," for Henrietta and Lacks, in big black letters on the side of each tube, Mary carried them to the incubator room that Gey had built just like he's built everything else in the lab: by hand and mostly from junkyard scraps, a skill he'd learned from a life-time of making do with nothing.”
  • “Hennie made life come alive -bein with her was like bein with fun," Sadie told me, staring toward the ceiling as she talked. "Hennie just love peoples. She was a person that could realy make the good things come out of you."”
  • “Like I'm always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can't do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different."”
    Deborah, "Dale" Lacks
  • “"We're a mess!" she said, pointing to the hives now covering her face. "Lord, I was so anxious last night. I couldn't do anything with myself so I painted my fingernails." She held out her hands for me to see. "I did a horrible job!" she said, laughing. "I think I did it after I took my pill."”
  • “We must not see any person as an abstract. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anquish, and with some measure of triumph.”
    Elie Wiesel
  • “He wrongly believed that light could kill cell cultures, so his laboratory looked like the photo negative of a Ku Klux Klan rally, where technicians worked in long black robes, heads covered in black hoods with small slits cut for their eyes. (pg 72)”
  • “Henrietta's cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it.”
  • “One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons...”
  • “No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells—her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died. Her real name is Henrietta Lacks.”
  • “When tissues are removed from your body, with or without your consent any claim you might have had to own them vanishes. When you leave tissues in a doctor's office or a lab, you abandon them as waste, and anyone can take your garbage and sell it.”
    Supreme Court of California
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.
    Highlighted by 399 Kindle customers
  • Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus—and at the very same time—that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.
    Highlighted by 358 Kindle customers
  • Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge. Many scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment. And as Howard Jones once wrote, “Hopkins, with its large indigent black population, had no dearth of clinical material.”
    Highlighted by 316 Kindle customers
  • If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”
    Highlighted by 312 Kindle customers
  • Her cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease; and they’ve been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers.
    Highlighted by 308 Kindle customers
  • But I always have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin about them takin her cells, now we don’t get a dime.
    Highlighted by 252 Kindle customers
  • But Carrel wasn’t interested in immortality for the masses. He was a eugenicist: organ transplantation and life extension were ways to preserve what he saw as the superior white race, which he believed was being polluted by less intelligent and inferior stock, namely the poor, uneducated, and nonwhite. He dreamed of never-ending life for those he deemed worthy, and death or forced sterilization for everyone else. He’d later praise Hitler for the “energetic measures” he took in that direction.
    Highlighted by 243 Kindle customers
  • “When I saw those toenails,” Mary told me years later, “I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she’s a real person. I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I’d never thought of it that way.”
    Highlighted by 229 Kindle customers
  • Diagnosing carcinoma in situ had only been possible since 1941, when George Papanicolaou, a Greek researcher, published a paper describing a test he’d developed, now called the Pap smear.
    Highlighted by 211 Kindle customers
  • Mississippi Appendectomies, unnecessary hysterectomies performed on poor black women to stop them from reproducing, and to give young doctors a chance to practice the procedure. I’d also read about the lack of funding for research into sickle-cell anemia, a disease that affected blacks almost exclusively.
    Highlighted by 144 Kindle customers
Show all 26 quotes from this book

Setting & Locations edit see section history

First Sentence edit see section history

There's a photo on my wall of a woman I've never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape.

Table of Contents edit see section history

A Few Words About This Book
Prologue: The Woman in the Photograph
Deborah's Voice

Part 1: Life

1. The Exam ... 1951
2. Clover ... 1920-1942
3. Diagnosis and Treatment ... 1951
4. The Birth of HeLa ... 1951
5. "Blackness Be Spreadin All Inside" ... 1951
6. "Lady's on the Phone" ... 1999
7. The Death and Life of Cell Culture ... 1951
8. "A Miserable Specimen" ... 1951
9. Turner Station ... 1999
10. The Other Side of the Tracks ... 1999
11. "The Devil of Pain Itself" ... 1951

Part 2: Death

12. The Storm ... 1951
13. The HeLa Factory ... 1951-1953
14. Helen Lane ... 1953-1954
15. "Too Young to Remember" ... 1951-1965
16. "Spending Eternity in the Same Place" ... 1999
17. Illegal, Immoral, and Deplorable ... 1954-1966
18. "Strangest Hybrid" ... 1960-1966
19. "The Most Critical Time on This Earth Is Now" ... 1966-1973
20. The HeLa Bomb ... 1966
21. Night Doctors ... 2000
22. "The Fame She So Richly Deserves" ... 1970-1973

Part 3: Immortality

23: "It's Alive" ... 1973-1974
24: "Least They Can Do" ... 1975
25: "Who Told You You Could Sell My Spleen?" ... 1976-1988
26: Breech of Privacy ... 1980-1985
27: The Secret of Immortality ... 1984-1995
28: After London ... 1996-1999
29: A Village of Henriettas ... 2000
30: Zakariyya ... 2000
31: Hela, Goddess of Death ... 2000-2001
32: "All That's My Mother" ... 2001
33: The Hospital for the Negro Insane ... 2001
34: The Medical Records ... 2001
35: Soul Cleansing ... 2001
36: Heavenly Bodies ... 2001
37: "Nothing to Be Scared About" ... 2001
38: The Long Road to Clover ... 2009

Where They Are Now
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Glossary edit see section history

  • HeLa: The name given to the cells taken from Henrietta Lack's cancerous tumor.
  • FISH (fluorescence in situ hybridization): A cytogenetic technique developed by Christoph Lengauer that is used to detect and localize the presence or absence of specific DNA sequences on chromosomes. -Wikipedia
  • HPV: Human papillomavirus.
  • Nuremberg Code: The Nuremberg Code is a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation set as a result of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials at the end of the Second World War. -Wikipedia
  • Glossary: Describe this term.

Series & Lists edit see section history

This book is in NPR Summer Books 2010. (authoritative list)
This is book 5 of 20 in New York Times Bestsellers - Paperback Nonfiction (Current). (authoritative list)
This is book 6 of 10 in Library Journal's Top Ten 2010. (community list)
This book is in New York Times Bestsellers (Current). (authoritative list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Rebecca Skloot (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: CROWN
Country: USA
Publication Date: 2010
ISBN: 1400052173
Page Count: 368

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: RC265.6 L24 S55
  • Dewey: 616.02774092

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Reading Level: Adults

While written in a readable, non-technical manner, the content is best suited for adult level readers.Thoughtful high school readers will find much of interest as well. There is some adult content, (medical information,) and some adult language as well.

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • Medical Apartheid
  • The Secret Life of Bees
  • When You Reach Me
  • The Help
  • Let the Great World Spin
  • My Lobotomy

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

   
  • The Immortal Cell: One Scientist's Quest to Solve the Mystery of Human Aging
  • Culturing Life

We’re hiding the errata, movie connections, books that influenced this book, books influenced by this book and books that cite this book sections. If you would like to add content to them, you must first make them visible.

This book has no spoilers.

© 2006-2013 Shelfari | Terms & Conditions | Privacy Policy | Copyright Policy

Close