Friday Morning Book Club

For the August Morning Book Club we'll be reading, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot. This is a Non-Fiction title.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco
farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge -
became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture,
which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years. HeLa cells were vital for
developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped
lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought
and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than 20 years after her death, when scientists
investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though
the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never
saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family - past and present -
is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics,
and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family -
especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her
mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t
her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, 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.