Gov Reads: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks is immortal. She didn’t aim to be immortal, she just wanted to get better. She knew she was sick, and when she went to Johns Hopkins one day for a biopsy on a ‘knot inside her’ the doctor took a slice of her cervix tumor and give it to a lab at the hospital that was collecting cultures. Henrietta was the mother of five, receiving free medical care for aggressive cancer when those cells were taken without her knowledge or her consent. But to researchers, they were a medical miracle because for the first time ever, human cells grew in lab. And grew, and grew, and never stopped growing. Something no other human cells had done before. Those cells are used almost everywhere in every type of research, and are known to researchers everywhere as the famous (and infamous) HeLa cells. But what about the woman behind those cells? What happened to her family after she died from cervical cancer? What about the issues behind those cells? Consent, family, money, emotional turmoil, and life-saving advances in medicine are just some of the things that Rebecaa Skloot tackles in her book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”