I finished reading this book the day after Mother's Day in 2010. One of the main individuals in the story died the day after Mother's Day in 2009. The story also made me a little sad - poverty, lack of education, lack of access to medical needs.
Wired magazine has a timeline of what HeLa cells were used for throughout the years - all the different vaccine and research on genetics and space biology and others.I liked that it had a timeline at the top of each chapter to let you know which year each chapter was set at. The book did go back and forth a little in terms of time line - to tell both Henrietta's story and Henrietta's daughter's story (her name was Deborah, nicknamed Dale). Skloot took over 10 years to put the book together, and it required a lot of persistence, bravery, patience and courage.But now that I have read the book, I understand the photo and the orangey background. I didn't quite like the cover when I first saw it - it certainly didn't make me want to pick it up to take a look.Henrietta Lacks' cells are known as HeLa. I didn't know about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, The Hospital for The Negro Insane, that scientists inject cancer cells in patients to see if the cancer will spread, that the cells are named after the patient it comes from - with the first two letters from the first name and the first two letters from the last name - e.g. While I was in school, I read fiction to escape, but now that I am not in school, I read non-fiction to keep on learning. I learned a lot from this book - I guess that's why I like reading non-fiction because I get to learn about things I normally won't.Skloot's writing made this a very easy-to-read book. There were definitely parts of that books that made me ached, amused and cried. One of the participants in the book discussion put it quite well together - this book is a bridge - it helps non-scientists understand a bit of science (and make us more aware of our rights as patients too) but at the same time it helps scientists to understand the human side of the story. It is about ethics, patient rights, race, family and love as well. If you are just going to read one non-fiction book this year, read this book! To sum it up in one word - FASCINATING! I didn't quite know what to expect, I thought it may be a little dry since it's about science and cells and cells research.So I bumped this up to be read first so I can participate in the discussion. However, I saw that my workplace was going to have a book discussion about it - I work in a pretty big healthcare company so I thought it'd be interesting to talk about this book with others from the same field. Thought I'd read it sometime later as I have a big piles of books to read yet. It sounded interesting enough that I put it on my to-be-read list. I first heard about this book on a online forum. There's a photo on my wall of a woman I've never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape.
Quotes from the immortal life of henrietta lacks full#
Full of warmth and questing intelligence, astonishing in scope and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences. Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey in search of Henrietta's story, from the "coloured" ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live, and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Yet Henrietta herself remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. The first 'immortal' human tissue grown in culture, HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping and have been bought and sold by the billions.
She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer whose cancer cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. It is a story about science but, much more, about life" - Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief. "Skloot's book is wonderful - deeply felt, gracefully written, sharply reported. "One of the most graceful and moving non-fiction books I've read in a very long time" - Dwight Garner, New York Times.
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