"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot

Release date: March 8, 2011
Publisher: Broadway Books
Pages: 381
Buy: Amazon(US) |  Amazon(CA) |  Barnes & Noble

Immortality is something that most of us fantasize about at one point or another… however, we all believe it to be something of a fairy tale, an impossible feat. While I’m not going to say that the secret to immortality has been uncovered, scientists have actually managed to find immortal cells… those of a lady named Henrietta Lacks. Rest assured, the lady has now been dead and buried in an unmarked grave for a few decades… however, her cells still live on as if nothing had happened.

About twenty years after her death, scientists began investigating her cells through her husband and children. When they discovered the anomaly, the field of medicine grew exponentially. It gave us the ability not only to understand a lot more than we did about various viruses and diseases such as cancer, but it also helped to develop a large variety of human biological materials. While the industry was making millions upon millions of dollars from Henrietta’s cells, her family didn’t see a dime of that money.

While the scientific progress was considerable, this didn’t go down without any drama. When the Henrietta’s descendants learned about the whole situation, it didn’t take them a long time to start raising a variety of ethical questions about the whole situation, such as why Henrietta’s children cannot even afford medical insurance, considering she played such a big role in shaping the field of modern medicine.

In any case, if you would like to learn Henrietta’s story from the John Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to today’s sterilized white laboratories, the scientific impact her cells made as well as the drama that ensued, I recommend that you look into a book titled The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. To make a long story short, the book is basically dedicated to chronicling the life of Henrietta Lacks, and more importantly the impact her immortal cells had on the rest of the world.

Rebecca Skloot Personal site Rebecca Skloot is an American freelancing author who has taken to writing books centered in one way or another around medicine. In 2010 she published her first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and it became a bestseller, staying on the New York Times List for a period of two years, and there are even talks of making it into a movie. Amongst the many awards she won are the 2011 National Academies of Science Best Book Award and the 2011 Audie Award.