The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot chronicles how a poor Black tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks, who died of cervical cancer in 1951 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, became the unwitting source of the HeLa cell line—the first human cells to survive and multiply indefinitely in culture. Those cells helped make possible the polio vaccine, in vitro fertilization, gene mapping, and countless cancer and virus studies, yet for decades Lacks's family knew nothing of their existence or their commercial value. The book braids three strands: Lacks's biography and the Jim Crow medical world she navigated; the parallel rise of cell-culture research and its scientific pioneers, including George Gey, who cultured HeLa, and researchers who later commercialized cell products; and Skloot's own decade-long effort to win the trust of Lacks's surviving children, especially Deborah Lacks, whose search for her mother's story drives much of the narrative. Skloot documents key episodes such as the 1951 tissue sampling without informed consent, the 1971 revelation to the family, and the 1970s–80s debates over privacy, patenting, and consent. Woven throughout are ethical questions the case crystallized: who owns human tissue, whether patients must consent to research, and how race and class shape medical treatment and trust. The 2010 book, expanded from Skloot's 2000 profile, also led to the 2013 NIH agreement giving Lacks's descendants some control over HeLa genome data.