Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Seems like the end of the week has become a good time for a book review - for now anyway. I'll keep it up as long as I can either find something interesting to read or have an assignment. This week's book review is about a book that I read for pleasure. I saw someone I follow on Twitter mention it and I looked it up on Amazon and it looked interesting to me so I downloaded it to my Kindle and soon after started reading. The name of the book is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and it was written by Rebecca Skloot.

Have you ever heard of Hela cells? If not, then you are probably not working in the field of science because I had never heard of Hela before reading this book. If you haven't guessed yet, this book is a work of non-fiction, and is about Hela cells, which came from Henrietta Lacks. When Mrs. Lacks was in her early 30s, she contracted cervical cancer. She lived in the Baltimore area and she sought treatment at Johns Hopkins hospital which provided medical assistance to the poor. In the 1950s, which was when Mrs. Lacks' cancer was discovered, treatment for cancer was still experimental, more or less. Radiation treatments were given to Mrs. Lacks, but sadly, the treatment did not work and she passed away.

During the time she was being treated at Hopkins, a doctor took a sample of the cells of her cervix, and the first two letters of her first and last name were written on the vial in which the cells were stored (HeLa). Until this time, the doctor collecting samples had not been able to keep any cells alive for more than a day or two; but there was something special about Henrietta's cells. Not only did they live, but the multiplied, flourished and have continued to replicate over the years and are still used in labs all over the world today - almost 60 years after her death. Henrietta's cells became instrumental in developing a vaccine for polio and were also used to develop many chemo-therapies used to day as well as a plethora of other drugs and solutions to the medical problems faced by society.

Although a work of non-fiction, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks reads like a novel, which is part of the appeal. Ms. Skloot heard of Hela in her college science class and soon after began a discovery to find out about the person who was behind Hela. The novel took years of research and years of spending time with Henrietta's uneducated but very interesting family. I make the point that they were uneducated not to be rude, but because truly, this is one of the major parts of the story. These people were not blessed to have access to education and were often confused and misled about what happened to Henrietta. That in itself makes for an interesting story.

The book details, as much as possible, the life of Henrietta from her childhood to when she married, to her cancer, and then her untimely death. It also goes into detail about her children and her husband and what happened to them after she died. I never thought a book about science and cells could be so interesting, but this book was fascinating from beginning to end. I don't know that I would put this book in the category of the ever popular "summer beach read" but you should definitely put it on your reading list, especially if you like to read non-fiction.