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Rebecca Skloot's book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is forthcoming from Crown, an imprint of Random House.
In 1951, doctors took a small tissue sample from a woman named Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge or consent. A scientist put that sample into a test tube, and though Henrietta died a few months later, her cells are still alive today. They became the first human cell line ever grown in culture and one of the most important tools in medicine: They helped create the polio vaccine and went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity. They sat at atomic bomb test sites, uncovered the secrets of cancer, and are now bought and sold by the billions worldwide. Henrietta's cells did wonders for science, but had dramatic and troubling consequences for her five children, and her husband -- a tobacco farmer with a third grade education who struggled to afford health care and didn't learn about the cells until 25 years after Henrietta's death. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks traces the history and ethics of tissue research through telling the remarkable story of those cells, the woman they came from, and the collision between science and her family.
To read articles adapted from the book, follow these links:
Cells That Save Lives Are a Mother's Legacy. The New York Times, 11/17/01 (syndicated in papers throughout the US, England and Australia).
Henrietta's Dance: Award winning story of Henrietta Lacks and the origin of the HeLa cell line, Johns Hopkins Magazine, April 2000.
Taking The Least of You: Those blood and tissue samples you routinely give - where are they? Who owns them? What are they being used for? And how come you don't know? New York Times Magazine Cover Story, April 16, 2006. (See Skloot's blog for follow up to this story)
Obsessed With Culture: George Gey and his quest to cure cancer, with the help of Henrietta Lacks. Pitt Magazine, March 2001. |
