The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is a non-fiction book that tells the story of Lacks and her HeLa cells, or the immortal cell line that doctors retrieved from her cervical cancer cells. Crown Publishing Group published the book in 2010, and it won a National Academies Communication Award the following year. This guide refers to the Crown 2010 first edition.

Henrietta Lacks was a black American woman who died of cancer in 1951 at age 31. Before she died, doctors took a sample from her tumor without her knowledge or consent and used the sample for medical research. The cells in Henrietta’s tissue sample, known as HeLa cells (pronounced hee-lah), were the first human cells to survive in a culture, where they thrived and multiplied. Consequently, HeLa cells have since been used in scientific research all over the world and have played a fundamental role in numerous medical advances and developments, like the polio vaccine.

For over two decades, Henrietta’s identity was unknown, and her family knew nothing about HeLa and the role their mother unknowingly played in medical research. By the 1970s, however, her name was publicly revealed.

When Skloot first hears about Henrietta at college in the 1980s, she is surprised at how little information she learns: “As the other students filed out of the room, I sat thinking, That’s it? That’s all we get? There has to be more to this story” (4).