Rebecca Skloot, a science writer, assistant professor of English at the University of Memphis, and author of the blog The Culture Dish, has written a terrific new book: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The reviews have been uniformly positive, and I’ve just swelled the chorus with my own review over at Barnes and Noble. An excerpt from what I wrote:
Henrietta Lacks lives a shadowy life as a footnote in biology textbooks. I first encountered her when taking a college course in cell biology: the cells used in a particular experiment, we learned, were “HeLa cells,” which, though human, can grow independently outside the body in specially created laboratory conditions. They were named for the woman, Helen Lane, from whom they were originally derived. And that was all; having explained this, my professor returned to discussing the experiment and its significance. Like a drowned corpse bobbing up from the dark depths of footnote-dom, Helen Lane had surfaced briefly, only to descend again into obscurity. I didn’t give her a second thought.
In contrast, science writer Rebecca Skloot also had a Helen Lane footnote moment in high school, but saw in that footnote the nucleus of a story about science and society. After ten years of HeLa sleuthing, Skloot’s hunch has paid off handsomely: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a modern classic of science writing.
Let me qualify that. This isn’t science writing in the sense of Stephen Jay Gould or Richard Dawkins: Skloot doesn’t spend a lot of time describing or extolling scientific discoveries. For her, the science is a bit player — though an important one — in a complex and fascinating drama about how medical research intersected the lives of a poor black family in America. Her mixture of science and biography is sui generis, and its themes profound: racism, ethics, and scientific illiteracy.
Do read this book. If you’ve had any acquaintance with cell biology, you’ve heard of HeLa cells—cells derived from a cervical tumor and now widely used to study all manner of things. “HeLa” turns out to be short not for “Helen Lane” (a journalist’s pseudonym), but for Henrietta Lacks, a black, working-class woman from whom the cells were derived (and who died a terrible death from her cancer). Skloot spent a decade tracking down the story, overcoming the resistance of Lacks’s family, and, ultimately, becoming part of the story herself as she befriended Lacks’s daughter Deborah and helped her learn about and come to terms with her mother’s story. It’s an engrossing read: one of those rare science-related books that is hard to put down.
Skloot was on ‘Fresh Air’ two or three days ago to talk about the book. It was interesting.
She mentioned a recent court decision in Texas, which found (unusually) that plaintiffs’ cells were indeed their property; the result was that millions of cells were destroyed because that was the alternative to paying royalties to fuckknowshowmany people. A worrying precedent. I meant to find out more about it…
I listened to the interview, too. Highly recommended, it should be up by now in Fresh Air online archives.
This book is popular. I am request number 42 on the library consortium list. Fifteen libraries have a copy so far, so it wont be too long of a wait.
I’m 22 on my library’s waiting list.
I’ve never used HeLa cells but back in the late 70’s some friends did. I remember that for a while they had been concerned that the line had been contaminated by another mammalian cell line. This wasn’t just a local incident. Was this true? Anybody know?
No, but Skloot said HeLa cells themselves contaminated lots of other cells – apparently (if I remember this right) because they were so robust that they outcompeted any other cells. So researchers who thought they had different cells found that in fact it was HeLa cells everywhere.
Actually, the opposite is the current concern. Many cancer cell lines from presumably other sources (prostate cancer, breast cancer, etc.) have reportedly be shown to be contaminated with, or consist entirely of, HeLa cells. There’s actually an investigator (I can’t remember his name – I think he’s in Germany) whose on a one-man crusade to show that many cancer cell lines used in many published studies are all just HeLa cells. We use them often in my lab. They’re a workhorse line (easy to transfect, express proteins well, quick doubling time, etc.)
Oops. Ophelia beat me to it.
I remember first learning about HeLa and Henrietta Lacks from a “60 Minutes” report when I was a kid (late 70’s or early 80’s). Thirty years later and she’s still going strong!
Never had a Henrietta moment. Never heard of Henrietta Lacks. But what an astonishing story! Disturbing too, and in some ways, spooky. I will read this book. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. (By the way, if I didn’t say it before, I found my copy of your book, so I didn’t need to buy the Penguin. I’m reading Stenger on New Atheism, but I’ll get back to WEIT. Read it once very quickly. It’s a great book for the non-scientist. Makes me wish I had paid more attention way back when!)