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Henrietta LacksThe Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Reading Order
Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) is the story of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951 at the age of thirty-one, and of the HeLa cells taken from her tumor without her knowledge or consent — cells that became one of the most important tools in medical research, contributing to the development of the polio vaccine, cancer research, and countless other breakthroughs, while her family remained in poverty and ignorance of her contribution.
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Complete Henrietta Lacks Book List
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot·2010·The complete standalone book. Start here.
Henrietta Lacks — Frequently Asked Questions
What are HeLa cells and why are they important?
HeLa cells are the first human cell line successfully grown in a laboratory culture — cells taken from Henrietta Lacks's cervical cancer tumor in 1951 by Johns Hopkins researcher George Gey, which turned out to be uniquely capable of surviving and reproducing outside the human body indefinitely. Before HeLa cells, researchers could not maintain human cells alive in culture long enough to study them; the availability of an unlimited supply of living human cells transformed biological research. HeLa cells were used to develop the polio vaccine (Jonas Salk used them to test his vaccine in 1952), have been used in cancer research, genetics, toxicology testing, the development of the COVID-19 vaccine, and thousands of other applications. Billions of HeLa cells exist today in laboratories around the world.
What are the ethical issues raised by The Immortal Life?
Skloot's book raises multiple intersecting ethical issues: the lack of informed consent (Henrietta Lacks was not told her cells were being taken or that they would be used in research); the racial dimensions of that failure (as a Black woman in a segregated hospital in 1951, she had even less power to question medical authority than a white patient would have); the commercialization of her cells (the HeLa cell line became worth billions of dollars to the biotech industry, while her family couldn't afford health insurance); and the broader questions about who owns cells and tissues taken from a patient's body, which were not resolved by American law until decades later and remain contested. The book contributed to ongoing conversations about biobank consent and genomic privacy.
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