The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot, 2010
A young journalist chases the woman behind the first immortal human cells and finds a family still living with what science took without asking.
Rebecca Skloot
Skloot spent a decade reporting the book and founded the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, which supports descendants of research subjects.
Feels like unease, faith and awe.
The woman whose cells outlived her, and the question of what she would think.
I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever—bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. Books by Rebecca Skloot
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