<![CDATA[The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks]]>

false <![CDATA[The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1254806210m/6493208.jpg 6493208 1 A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, Spring 2010: Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live, and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences. Praise for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks “Skloot’s book is wonderful—deeply felt, gracefully written, sharply reported.” –SUSAN ORLEAN, author of The Orchid Thief “No one can say exactly where Henrietta Lacks is buried: during the many years Rebecca Skloot spent working on this book, even Lacks’s hometown of Clover, Virginia, disappeared. But that did not stop Skloot in her quest to exhume, and resurrect, the story of her heroine and her family. What this important, invigorating book lays bare is how easily science can do wrong, especially to the poor. The issues evoked here are giant: who owns our bodies, the use and misuse of medical authority, the unhealed wounds of slavery ... and Skloot, with clarity and compassion, helps us take the long view. This is exactly the sort of story that books were made to tell—thorough, detailed, quietly passionate, and full of revelation.” —TED CONOVER, author of Newjack and The Routes of Man “Writing with a novelist’s artistry, a biologist’s expertise, and the zeal of an investigative reporter, Skloot tells a truly astonishing story of racism and poverty, science and conscience, spirituality and family driven by a galvanizing inquiry into the sanctity of the body and the very nature of the life force.” —BOOKLIST (starred review) “It’s extremely rare when a reporter’s passion finds its match in a story. Rarer still when the people in that story courageously join that reporter in the search for what we most need to know about ourselves. When this occurs with a moral journalist who is also a true writer, a human being with a heart capable of holding all of life’s damage and joy, the stars have aligned. This is an extraordinary gift of a book, beautiful and devastating—a work of outstanding literary reportage. Read it! It’s the best you will find in many many years.” —ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC, author of Random Family ”The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks brings to mind the work of Philip K. Dick and Edgar Allan Poe. But this tale is true. Rebecca Skloot explores the racism and greed, the idealism and faith in science that helped to save thousands of lives but nearly destroyed a family. This is an extraordinary book, haunting and beautifully told.” —ERIC SCHLOSSER, author of Fast Food Nation “Rebecca Skloot has written a marvelous book so original that it defies easy description. She traces the surreal journey that a tiny patch of cells belonging to Henrietta Lacks’s body took to the forefront of science. At the same time, she tells the story of Lacks and her family—wrestling the storms of the late twentieth century in America—with rich detail, wit, and humanity. The more we read, the more we realize that these are not two separate stories, but one tapestry. It’s part The Wire, part The Lives of the Cell, and all fascinating.” —CARL ZIMMER, author of Microcosm “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks takes the reader on a remarkable journey—compassionate, troubling, funny, smart—and irresistible. Along the way, Rebecca Skloot will change the way you see medical science and lead you to wonder who we should value more—the researcher or the research subject? Ethically fascinating and completely engaging—I couldn’t recommend it more.” —DEBORAH BLUM, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook and The Monkey Wars “A remarkable debut … recalls Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family ... A rich, resonant tale of modern science, the wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit society’s most vulnerable people.“ -PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review) More information and advance praise available <a href="http://rebeccaskloot.com/?page_id=8">on the book's website</a>. 6684634 book 2 2 2010 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks total:4|5:4|4:0|3:0|2:0|1:0| 4 20 30 2 5 3 false false Thu Nov 05 19:41:11 -0800 2009 Thu Nov 05 20:05:32 -0800 2009
When this type of narrative non-fiction is done well it's something to celebrate and this book is done REALLY well. Every time I thought it couldn't get more interesting I would turn the page and be flabbergasted anew.

A quick bit of background: Every medical researc...more...]]> 5 0 false false Tue Nov 10 19:29:57 -0800 2009 Tue Nov 10 19:36:00 -0800 2009 more...]]> 0 0 false false Fri Nov 20 07:55:17 -0800 2009 Fri Nov 20 07:55:17 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Wed Nov 18 08:53:49 -0800 2009 Wed Nov 18 08:53:49 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Tue Nov 17 11:26:29 -0800 2009 Tue Nov 17 11:26:29 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Mon Nov 16 14:34:06 -0800 2009 Mon Nov 16 14:34:06 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Sat Nov 14 12:17:28 -0800 2009 Sat Nov 14 12:17:28 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Fri Nov 13 11:29:19 -0800 2009 Fri Nov 13 11:29:19 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Thu Nov 12 10:46:06 -0800 2009 Thu Nov 12 10:46:06 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Mon Nov 09 17:21:11 -0800 2009 Mon Nov 09 17:21:11 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Thu Nov 05 14:50:20 -0800 2009 Thu Nov 05 14:50:20 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Thu Oct 22 13:51:58 -0700 2009 Thu Oct 22 13:51:58 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Fri Oct 16 20:13:23 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 16 20:13:26 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Sat Oct 10 09:39:30 -0700 2009 Sat Oct 10 09:39:48 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Wed Oct 07 09:19:57 -0700 2009 Wed Oct 07 09:19:57 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Wed Oct 07 03:45:47 -0700 2009 Wed Oct 07 03:45:47 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Mon Oct 05 23:00:05 -0700 2009 Mon Oct 05 23:00:05 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Mon Oct 05 22:26:24 -0700 2009 Mon Oct 05 22:26:24 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Mon Oct 05 22:19:50 -0700 2009 Mon Oct 05 22:19:55 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Fri Oct 02 08:58:50 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 02 08:59:14 -0700 2009 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=6493208