Book Review on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Very often I disregard the recommendations of my peers when it comes to selecting books. But when a fellow student of biotechnology told me about this book, I knew that there was a need for me to read this. Thank you, Pooja Bharali for recommending this and countless other books, during our sojourn at the decadent Gauhati University.

Rebecca Skloot, the author, is a science writer. Meaning, it is her job to write about science to make non-scientists understand the meaning or message behind a scientific invention or discovery. She first came to know of Henrietta during a high school biology class where her teacher told her about the cell line known as HeLa, and the woman from whom the cells were obtained, Henrietta Lacks. Rebecca’s determination has brought to light the story of Henrietta and the Lacks family. The book focuses not on the benefits that humanity has reaped off of HeLa, but the recognition that the Lacks never received.

Henrietta was born into a family of tobacco farmers in Virginia in the year 1920. She grew up to marry one of her cousins, David Lacks. They had four children. In life, Henrietta was known as a hospitable, caring, lively person who loved to go dancing. People she grew up with called her a great beauty as well. Her home was always open to family members in need of food and shelter. This is what Rebecca Skloot’s research into Henrietta’s early life revealed.

In her early thirties, Henrietta started feeling ‘a knot in her womb’. By then she had had three children. She went up to John’s Hopkins Hospital to be checked up. Instead of receiving any explanation of her illness (cervival cancer), her tumor cells were taken for biopsy and later cultured by scientists in the lab. At the time, it was routine procedure for doctors to obtain tissue samples without the patient’s knowledge and then study them for any number of tests. Whether those tests were pertinent to the patient’s diagnosis and treatment was not a matter of concern.

Unlike all the other cells that cell culturists had been trying to grow at the time, Henrietta’s cells flourished. They multiplied and divided (which mean the same thing in biological terms), and filled up layer after layer of cell culture vials. The cell line was named HeLa, and was often mistaken to have come from a Helen Lane or Helen Larson. That they had been the tumor cells of a black tobacco farmer from Virginia, was forgotten.

Up until Henrietta’s cells were stably cultured, most cancer cells died out in the lab. HeLa cells made it possible to study and understand the difference in physiology between a normal and a cancerous cell. They help in the development and testing of anti cancer as well as anti viral drugs. They provide a system in which cell biologists can study the interaction of different molecules and enzymes. It was the closest thing to experimenting on a live human cell or tissue for decades. HeLa cells are still grown and used in most cell culture labs of the world.

It was only right that Rebecca Skloot throw light on the Lacks and bring their story to the fore front of the scientific community, forcing scientists to think about the humans and not just their parts. The Lacks family suffered a great deal of emotional trauma upon learning of the ever-growing, undying nature of Henrietta’s cells. The mother that they had buried several decades ago seemed to be alive in part in the labs of unknown people all across the world and even in space. The family, especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah Lacks, struggled a lot to understand the identity of their mother and what it meant when they said that her cells were still living.

The commoner might not have heard her name or her acronym as much as the student of biology, but we have all availed of the comforts that Henrietta has left behind as her legacy. For example, the large scale production of the Salk polio vaccine that saved millions of people from the crippling disease was only possible because of the easily culturable HeLa cells. It is therefore important to immortalize Henrietta not just in the vials of the laboratory, but in the combined memory of the people that she so unwittingly, yet benevolently benefitted.