The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The woman whose cells were taken without consent in 1951 and never stopped dividing, and the family left behind.
In 1951 a Baltimore doctor took a tissue sample from a poor Black woman dying of cervical cancer, without her knowledge. Her cells did not die, and HeLa went on to underpin the polio vaccine, cancer research, gene mapping and cloning, while her family lived without health insurance and without knowing she had been used. Rebecca Skloot spent a decade with the Lacks family, and the resulting book braids the science with their story and with the history of medical experimentation on Black Americans.
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Carl Zimmer
And they are real people; they are not just cardboard cutouts. Henrietta Lacks’s family faced the strangeness of life in a very intimate way. Their mother dies of cancer, and yet years later they hear from scientists that she is actually still alive, and she is in a lab somewhere. And they try to make sense of it all, which is tough, because they are not scientists. Her husband only got a grade-school education.
Interview · September 2012
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