The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the chronicle of a poverty-stricken woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, but whose bizarre cancer cells continue to live on in labs and medical facilities today. Lacks’s cells have become a sought-after commodity for researchers who have used them in everything from curing polio to gene mapping. The central message of the book is that Henrietta Lacks’s family is still poor, without health insurance, and somewhat confused about their mother’s involuntary contribution to science. Rebecca Skloot has written an impressive account of her research into the story of Henrietta Lacks, but ultimately it doesn’t succeed in winning me over as it has won over so many other readers.
Rebecca Skloot is a respected science writer and spent more than 10 years researching the story of Lacks and her cells. Early on, she tells readers that the book began as an investigation into the story behind the famous HeLa line of cells (the abbreviation is derived from the first two letters of each of Henrietta Lacks’s names). But, over the course of her research, the story turned into something much more personal to Skloot because she became close to Lacks’s daughter, Deborah, who was a toddler when her mother died.
Deborah is, like her mother, poor and uneducated, and she is initially skeptical of Skloot’s interest in the family. Deborah is skeptical because the family has learned that whenever a white person calls them, it’s going to be about the famous cells. Skloot fights an uphill battle to get information from Deborah about her mother. Eventually, however, Skloot wins the family’s trust and pieces together the fascinating life of Henrietta Lacks and how her cancer cells came to be harvested by a doctor at Johns Hopkins.
Skloot excels with her depiction of the details of Henrietta Lacks’s life: her childhood on the tobacco plantation, her marriage in 1941 and migration to Baltimore, the fascinating characters in her life. I loved reading about Henrietta dressing up and dancing on dirt-floor of the local juke joints and caring for her children. It is heartbreaking to learn that Lacks’s lovingly cared for, developmentally delayed daughter is shuffled off to a horrific institution after Lacks’s death. The humble details of Henrietta’s life stand in stark contrast to the clinical details of her death, and the subsequent anomaly of her cells’ apparent immortality.
The science portion of the book is interesting, but it’s not a home run. Skloot repeatedly tells us the various uses of the freak cancer cells, which can be purchased today from any medical bio-supply house for a few dollars. The cells have been to the moon, have been blown up, and have been subjected to every experiment known to medical science. The story of the doctors, including Dr. Gey, who is the researcher who “discovers” them and makes them available to the medical community isn’t all that compelling. It’s a sad tale, but not surprising. Gey took Lacks’s cells as part of a routine collection – she never consented or even knew it had happened. Later, these cells literally took on a life of their own outside her body. The legal and ethical arguments brought up by this treatment of Lacks are explored ably by Skloot, but this overarching discussion didn’t need the span of a whole book to be well documented. However, the comparisons between the questionable use of Lacks’s cells for research and the Tuskegee syphilis study are poignant and relevant.
The part of the book that was most disappointing for me is the relationship between Skloot and Deborah. I wish there was more development of this side of the story – it would be a better book if it were explored fully – but Skloot doesn’t go that far. The fact is that there is too wide a gulf culturally, economically, and educationally between these women. Skloot tries to explain to Deborah, who has barely an elementary school education, what a cell is. She takes Deborah along on trips to research Deborah’s mother and the sister who died in the institution, but there is no a meeting of the minds. Deborah is erratic and childlike. She seems incapable of truly grasping what happened to her mother and is focused on why she is still so poor when so many have made money off of her mother’s cells. In the end, Deborah, too, dies, but Skloot doesn’t find out about it until much later, when she happens to call another family member. This is clearly not the story of two friends from different backgrounds who have made a deep connection.
I realize that I’m in the minority of reviewers when it comes to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. A quick glance online shows that everyone from Oprah to reviewers at the New York Times just loved this book. For my part, I think it could have been a fine and fascinating in-depth magazine piece. It would have been better for Skloot to have focused on Henrietta’s life and the ethical issues of medical research using human cells rather than on her own journey regarding Deborah and the family--the forced relationship between the author and her subject’s daughter soured me. Despite Skloot’s token contribution of some proceeds of the book to Henrietta’s descendants, it still feels to me like another white person is taking advantage of the Lacks family.
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