The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
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List Price: $26.00
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Manufacturer: Crown
Written By: Rebecca Skloot
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 616.02774092
EAN: 9781400052172
Feature: ISBN13: 9781400052172
ISBN: 1400052173
Label: Crown
Manufacturer: Crown
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 384
Publication Date: 2010-02-02
Publisher: Crown
Release Date: 2010-02-02
Studio: Crown
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Features
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ISBN13: 9781400052172
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Editorial Reviews for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
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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, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. 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.
Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.
Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty 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, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? 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.
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Consumer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Highly recommended
Comment: An outstanding story well crafted and narrated. Clear and compassionate. Very high marks to both the author and the narrator, who does a remarkable job of bring the characters alive.
Customer Rating:
Summary: HeLa
Comment: I have been on the go and I am currently about half way through the book, and can't wait to get back to it. It is sooooo interesting and revealing of how she was exploited. A true depiction of what and how the medical world had gone over and beyond their boundaries as professionals. But at the same time you have to wonder had they not, would they had made the discoveries we take for granted today.
Very Interesting and highly recommended!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Really quite wonderful
Comment: This book has a lot going for it: interesting science, written so it is accessible to the lay reader; fascinating ethical and moral issues having to do with cell research and profits from that research, as well as the meaning of "informed consent"; and disturbing (and deeply moving) issues relating to class and race. It is no wonder that it has found so many readers. It is a very satisfying book all in all.
Customer Rating:
Summary: One of the BEST books I've read for a very long time - Check it out.
Comment: I became interested in this book after seeing a review in the local paper. When I worked in a research institute, I actually worked with this cell line, it intrigued me to learn more, and I felt a personal connection.
This book far exceeded my expectations. It was very well researched and written. I found myself fascinated with what had happened to Henrietta Lacks, her surviving family, and their progeny. There were many areas in this book that moved me to tears. The injustice done to Henrietta Lacks AND especially to her family really made me angry. Even a tiny portion of profits from the sales and resale of Mrs. Lack's cells could have made a huge difference in her family's lives. I was greatly saddened at the news of one of the key character's passing away. This individual should have been able to see the result of the many years of time spent telling their family story to the author. Even more sad was that she didn't get to enjoy the release of the long awaited book release.
I went to the website that Rebecca Skloot set up, and was glad to see that they are in fact working on establishing the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, which should benefit the family through donations. Ms. Skloot should be highly commended for undertaking this not so small task of rebuilding the facts around Henrietta Lacks' too short personal life, and the long one of her immortal cancer cells. A MUST READ.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Review
Comment: Great read for anyone with interest in medical history. Very fair and accurate reporting of medical facts and the Lacks family.
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More Information on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot ...
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Written by Rebecca Skloot Format: Hardcover ISBN: 9781400052172 Our Price: $26.00
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Book Tour - Bring ...
Profile. Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning science writer, and a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine; she's worked as a correspondent for the NPR show RadioLab, and PBS ...
Henrietta Lacks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rebecca Skloot, 2010 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Random House, ISBN 9781400052172 Related links. HeLa, the cell line named after Mrs. Lacks
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Some of the greatest medical advances of the past century – the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, gene mapping, and drug treatments for Leukemia and Parkinson’s disease – all ...
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the tale of a woman whose cells were used — without her knowledge — in breakthrough medical research after her 1951 death.
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Henrietta Lacks lives a shadowy life as a footnote in biology textbooks. I first encountered her when taking a college course in cell biology: the cells used in a particular ...
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks | Books | EW.com
Honestly, I shouldn't even have been reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I had the flu and was so feverish that sweat was dripping off my nose and spattering the pages.