The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

My first book group title review!  Every month, a few of my girlfriends and I get together to chat about a book we all read, taking turns bringing selections each month.  We've been meeting for nearly 2 years, and it has been one of the best ways of expanding my reading horizons.  We all have pretty different tastes, so it's fun to try out a book that I wouldn't normally pick up.

Henrietta Lacks is a perfect example, a science book that I have looked at a lot but never really felt pulled toward it.  I don't read much nonfiction, and particularly science titles since I often don't understand what the subject is about!  However, the author Rebecca Skloot does a marvelous job of marrying the topic of cells and gene and human tissues as property with the story of the Lacks family.  Henrietta Lacks was a Baltimore African American woman in the 1950's; mother of 5, generous, beautiful, and vivacious, who in her early 30's is stricken with a heinously aggressive form of cervical cancer.  Her doctor took a sample of her cancer cells, without consent, and makes the world-altering discovery that her cells can grow outside of the body, something that hadn't been done before.  The discovery leads to all kinds of advances in science in medicine, including a key role in the polio vaccine, and a multibillion dollar industry of cell production for research.  Her family, meanwhile, has no idea of the role her cells, called Hela cells, have played, and struggle to even pay basic doctors fees for the myriad health issues that plague them.  This is the story of how Skloot manages to gain the family's trust to tell the story of their mother after years of people either keeping them in the dark, or trying to take advantage of them.

Skloot manages to make the science portions of the book completely riveting and accessible, and the narrative of the Lacks family into one in which you have to root for them.  You want everything to turn out well, they are such characters!  Her children are all very interesting, each with their own struggles dealing with the whole situation that grew out the death of their mother when they were quite young.  I highly recommend this book, and it will certainly make you question where your rights to your body tissues lie.  It is a quick read despite its length.  My whole book group really enjoyed reading this, it was nice to get together and discuss what feelings it brought up for each of us.