Encompassing science, ethics and biography, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is as much a fascinating story as it is a book on medical science. I was intrigued by Rebecca Skloot’s book because it was so different from the other popular science books I had read before coming to Oxford. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a book I wish I had read long ago, so that, when asked the inevitable “what have you been reading?” in medical school interviews I would have been able to answer with genuine passion and interest. Skloot’s sensitive portrayal of Henrietta’s surviving children and their struggle to understand their mother’s “immortality” is interwoven with stories of other individuals whose tissues have been bought and sold, with or without their consent, to ask the compelling question: who owns our cells once they are no longer part of us? Understandably it breeds in them a mistrust of health professionals and authority more generally. Given the focus on informed consent and communication in modern medicine, I found the complete lack of communication with Henrietta and her family shocking. In fact, they do not even learn of its existence until years after Henrietta’s death, and, once they do, are deeply disturbed by the idea that their mother’s cells are being experimented on. Henrietta does not give consent for the mass-production and sale of her cells, and her family don’t see a penny of the profits from HeLa. However, it is not the scientific advances which HeLa helped bring about which made this book such an engrossing read for me, but the ethical issues that the book raises. It has been used in a vast and varied array of scientific research including research into cancer, the human genome, and the development of the polio vaccine, and it continues to be used to this day. After her death HeLa was mass-produced and sold to laboratories all over the world. It also tells the story of her legacy: the HeLa cell line, taken from Henrietta’s tumour while she was still alive, cultured in a lab, and discovered to be immortal. It tells the story of an African-American woman who died in 1951, aged just 31, of an aggressive cervical cancer. I needn’t have worried. It reads like the best of fiction. But this July, with the horror of exams fading to a distant memory, and two more months of summer holiday looming large ahead of me, I decided to take the plunge. Oh no, I’ll take fictional escapism any day. Let’s face it, after a day of being bombarded with information in lectures the last thing I want is to sit down to a book where I run the risk of actually learning something. There was always something more pressing to be read i.e. After countless recommendations, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was a book I had been meaning to read almost since it was first published, but somehow I had never quite got around to it.
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