Search results
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) is a non-fiction book by American author Rebecca Skloot. It was the 2011 winner of the National Academies Communication Award for best creative work that helps the public understanding of topics in science, engineering or medicine.
People also ask
What is 'the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks' about?
Who wrote the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks?
Did Henrietta Lacks have a 'knot' on her cervix?
Why is Henrietta Lacks buried?
In 1951, an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks discovered what she called a “knot” on her cervix that turned out to be a particularly virulent form of cervical cancer.
- Overview
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Prologue
Author of 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks' discusses the extraordinary ways medical research benefitted from an African American woman's cells—without her consent.
There isn’t a person reading this who hasn’t benefitted from Henrietta’s cells, code-named HeLa, which were taken without her knowledge in 1950.
When I first called Henrietta’s daughter Deborah Lacks with hopes of writing a book, I had no idea how deep the story actually ran—that Henrietta’s children were also used in research without consent in the 70s, that their medical records had been released to the press and published without their permission, and so much more. Learning that is what inspired me to create The Henrietta Lacks Foundation because I didn’t want to be another person who benefitted from the cells without doing something in return.
All I knew when I first called Henrietta’s family was that HeLa cells were of the most important advances in science and that they’d come from a black woman who no one knew anything about. I was obsessed with the question of who Henrietta was for decades. In the excerpt below, you can read the beginning of that story—the moment I first learned about HeLa cells.
But since the book’s publication in 2010, many people have asked “What made you become so obsessed with her in that moment?”
When I was 16, the year I first learned about HeLa cells, my father got very sick. Because of a viral infection, one day he went from being my healthy marathon-running dad to being incapacitated. He lost his memory, he couldn’t move from a recliner in the living room. It was terrifying—no one knew what was wrong with him, and it left him permanently disabled. He enrolled in a clinical trial that had some ethical problems, and I watched it all. When I first heard about Henrietta I thought: I wonder if she had any kids and what they think about those cells.
The Woman in the Photograph
Henrietta Lacks
There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. It’s the late 1940s and she hasn’t yet reached the age of thirty. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her—a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.”
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.
I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever—bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In 2010, Rebecca Skloot published The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a compelling look at Henrietta Lacks’ story, her impact on medical science, and important bioethical issues.
The book tells the true story of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman whose cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951 and became the first “immortal” human cell line—meaning that the cells can be grown and multiplied endlessly in the lab.
Mar 8, 2011 · She traces the surreal journey that a tiny patch of cells belonging to Henrietta Lacks’s body took to the forefront of science. At the same time, she tells the story of Lacks and her family—wrestling the storms of the late twentieth century in America—with rich detail, wit, and humanity.
Feb 7, 2010 · In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a poor black mother of five, came to Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, to receive treatment for cervical cancer; eight months later, she was dead. Some of her cancer cells...
