The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot; Pan Books; Price: Rs.325; 431 ppIn early 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman who had once been a tobacco farmer in Virginia, was treated for highly aggressive cervical cancer at the free coloured ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, Maryland. She died an excruciating death at the age of 31 the same year after receiving radium treatment, the standard curative for cervical cancer in the 1950s. She left behind a husband and five children, the youngest, a mere infant. Before she died, without her knowledge or consent, the attending doctor took two dime-size samples of tissue from her cervix, one cancerous and one healthy, and gave them to George Gey, a scientist who had been trying to establish a continuously reproducing, or immortal, human cell line for use in cancer research. These became the HeLa cells (named from the first two letters of her first and last names), an immortal line of cells that helped revolutionise modern medicine. Because HeLa cells are unusually resilient and robust and multiply at an astonishing rate, they succeeded where all other human samples had failed. Gey provided them free of charge to any scientist and researcher who requested samples. Later they were bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillion to laboratories around the world. Sixty years later, Henrietta Lacks tissue has yielded an estimated 50 million metric tons of HeLa cells. Today, trillions of them are still alive, and if they were laid end to end, they would encircle the earth three times. HeLa cells have generated a billion-dollar medical and pharmaceutical industry, helped biomedical research in cancer, virology, cloning, gene mapping, and in-vitro fertilisation. Scientific and medical researchers produce about 300 HeLa-related studies a month, steadily adding to the collection of 60,000 that already exist. Yet little is known about the woman behind HeLa, who is variously identified as Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson, but is often nameless. Her family learned of her immortality only 20 years after she passed away in the 1970s, when scientists started using HeLa in research, again without the familys consent. They benefited not at all from the involuntary ‘donation of their mothers tissue. Rebecca Skloot, a science reporter, who first heard of HeLa in her high school biology class, embarked upon a ten-year mission to set the record straight. Her book — equal parts popular science, historical biography, detective novel, and investigative journalism — is a compassionate and sensitive account of two parallel stories. The first is the history of HeLa and its contribution to medicine, and the second the story of the traumatic burden Henriettas immortal cells imposed upon her deeply troubled family as they struggled for understanding, reconciliation, and recognition. Skloots account is based on extensive primary and secondary sources (medical records, court documents, police records, family photographs, newspaper and magazine reports, wills, deeds, and birth and death certificates) and more than thousand hours of interviews with the Lacks family, friends,…
