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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

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Best Seller
Winner of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine’s 2011 Communication Award for Best Book
Winner of the 2010 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of the 2010 Wellcome Trust Book Prize
Named by more than 60 critics as one of the best books of 2010,
including:
A Best Book of the Year at: O, The Oprah Magazine, Publishers Weekly,
Library Journal, Bookmarks Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist,
Entertainment Weekly, East Bay Express, and Kansas City Star
A Discover Magazine 2010 Must Read
National Public Radio, Best of the Bestsellers

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 were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb; helped lead to important advances in cloning, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions, with devastating consequences for her family.

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 Henrietta’s children, unable to afford health insurance, wrestle with feelings of pride, fear, and betrayal.


Praise for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks...

“Thanks to Rebecca Skloot’s remarkable book, the Lacks case is likely to become a classic in the history of biomedical ethics. . . Skloot is a science journalist but this book also evidences her skill as a historian . . . provides a profound sense of history. Students in classes covering ethics, public health, and the history of medicine, childhood, the family, women, the 1950s, and race will be engrossed by Lacks’s story. The many questions raised by the existence and use of HeLa cells will generate hours of classroom discussion.” —Journal of the History of Medicine
"What is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks really about? Science, African American culture and religion, intellectual property of human tissues, Southern history, medical ethics, civil rights, the overselling of medical advances? . . . The book’s broad scope would make it ideal for an institution-wide freshman year reading program." —David J. Kroll, Professor and Chair, Pharmaceutical Sciences, North Carolina Central University

"An incredibly readable and smart text that should be a part of countless university discussions . . . Ethically fascinating and completely engaging–I couldn’t recommend it more." —Deborah Blum, Helen Firstbrook Franklin Professor of Journalism, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"A stunning illustration of how race, gender and disease intersect to produce a unique form of social vulnerability, this is a poignant, necessary and brilliant book." —Alondra Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology, Columbia University

"An essential component of biomedical research, Skloot finally gives the HeLa cell line its human face. HeLa grew from a tissue sample taken from a highly aggressive cancerous tumor on the cervix of 31-year-old Henrietta Lacks, a young, African-American mother, the child of tobacco farmers, and the granddaughter of slaves, who died a painful death in the colored ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951. She never gave permission for the sample to be taken; in turn, her cells have reproduced geometrically and scientists estimate that over 50 million metric tons of cells—as much as one hundred Empire State Buildings—have been grown since 1951. Skloot (a regular contributor to Popular Science ) offers a detailed and dramatic medical detective story, effectively balancing careful, scientific reporting with intense and respectful interactions with Lacks’s extended family. The brutal irony of Lacks’s life is that though her early death did not allow her to mother her own children, her cells and the medical miracles they engendered (polio vaccines, DNA research, and more) effectively mothered us all." —School Library Journal

Students Respond to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks:
"Unlike the stereotypical reading assignment that too often catalyzes students to bond over mutual dislike," writes Connecticut College student Jesse Neikrie in the Association of American Colleges and Universities magazine, "[The Immortal Life] appealed to people with diverse interests, including literature, science, history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, medicine, and social justice." For full article go to: http://tinyurl.com/5uyzqvz.

“If there ever was a piece of scholarship that encapsulated the interdisciplinary ideals and methods of American Studies,” writes Connecticut College student Claire Cafritz, “Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks would be it.” For full article go to: http://tinyurl.com/6gzsjbv.

Selected for Common Reading at nearly 150 colleges, universities and “One Book, One City” Reads, including:
Adelphi University
Agnes State College
Albion College
Armstrong Atlantic State University
Auburn University
Austin College
Bard College
Barry University School of Law
Barton College
Baton Rouge’s ‘One Book One Community’ Read
Belmont University
Beloit College
Boise State Campus Reads
Bookpal for Brother's College
Brooklyn College
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland State University Ohio
Coastal Carolina University
CC Allegheny County - North Campus
College of St. Scholastica
Community College of Baltimore County
Connecticut College
Cosumnes River College, One Book CRC
Cox College
Daniel Boone Regional Library
Dayton Big Read
Delaware County Community College
Delaware Valley College
Detroit Public Library
Earlham College
East Carolina University
Eastern Illinois University
Eastern Oregon University
Elizabethtown College
Emmanuel College
Fairmont State University
Florida Atlantic University Honors College
Florida State University
Follett Pioneer Bookstore California State University East Bay
Framingham State University
Frederick Country Reads
Gallaudet University
George Washington University
Georgia Institute of Technology
Grand Valley State University
Green River Community College
Greenville High School
Grossmont College
Gwynedd-Mercy College
Hamilton College
Hampton University
Hanover College
Henderson State University
Hesston College
Honors College at University of Arizona
Johns Hopkins University
Johnson County Community College
Kansas State University
Keene State College
Marian University
Marietta College
Marshall University
Maryville University
Massachusetts College of Art
Merced College
Metropolitan State College of Denver
Mills College
Missouri State University
Montclair State University
Moraine Valley Community College
Morehouse School of Medicine
Morgan State University
Mountain View College
North Carolina Agriculture and Technical University
North Carolina State University
Northwestern (Bookpal for Northwestern)
Northwestern University
Norwich University
Ohio State Mansfield & North Central State College
Ohio State University
Otterbein College
Pellissippi State Tech. Community College
Penn State Brandywine
Philadelphia University
Purdue University
Purdue University
Purdue University Calumet
Queensborough Community College
Randolph-Macon Academy
Regis University
Rhode Island: One Book, One State
Rochester Community and Technical College
Roger Williams University
Rollins College
Roosevelt University
Rowan University
Saint Francis University
Saint Xavier University
Sam Houston State University
San Diego State University
San Jose State University
Seton Hall University
Shepherd University
Smith College
Southern Methodist University
St. Ambrose University
St. Bonaventure University
St. Cloud University
St. Mary’s Episcopal School
SUNY Cortland
Sweet Briar College
Texas Christian University
Transylvania University
Tulane Freshmen Reads
UCLA
University of Alabama Birmingham
University of Arkansas
University of California Santa Barbara
University of California, Merced
University of Charleston
University of Delaware
University of Florida Honors Program
University of Houston Downtown
University of Kansas School of Medicine
University of Maryland
University of Mississippi
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
University of Rhode Island
University of Richmond One Book, One Campus Program
University of South Carolina Upstate
University of Tennessee
University of Texas Arlington
University of West Florida
University of Wisconsin Platteville
University of Wisconsin, Madison Big Reads
Virginia Commonwealth University
West Shore Community College
Western Michigan University
Western Washington University
Worcester State University

For a full list, email us at rhacademic@randomhouse.com

Also visit the blog post by Case Western professor, Jacqueline D. Lipton, Professor; Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research; Co-Director of the Center for Law Technology and the Arts; Associate Director of the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center.
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2010/03/the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks.html

To read Rebecca Skloot's conversation with Open Notebook's David Dobbs on writing creative non-fiction, go to: http://tiny.cc/ihzgv

You may find all links listed in the Related Links tab to your right.
© Manda Townsend

REBECCA SKLOOT is an award-winning science writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; and many others. She is coeditor of The Best American Science Writing 2011 and has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s Radiolab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW. She was named one of five surprising leaders of 2010 by the Washington Post. Skloot's debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, took more than a decade to research and write, and instantly became a New York Times bestseller. It was chosen as a best book of 2010 by more than sixty media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly, People, and the New York Times. It is being translated into more than twenty-five languages, adapted into a young reader edition, and being made into an HBO film produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball. Skloot is the founder and president of The Henrietta Lacks Foundation. She has a B.S. in biological sciences and an MFA in creative nonfiction. She has taught creative writing and science journalism at the University of Memphis, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University. She lives in Chicago. For more information, visit her website at RebeccaSkloot.com, where you’ll find links to follow her on Twitter and Facebook. 

View titles by Rebecca Skloot
PROLOGUE

The Woman in the Photograph

There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. It’s the late 1940s and she hasn’t yet reached the age of thirty. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her—a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.”

No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells—her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died.

Her real name is Henrietta Lacks.

I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever—bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.

There’s no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta’s cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they’d wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall.

I first learned about HeLa cells and the woman behind them in 1988, thirty-seven years after her death, when I was sixteen and sitting in a community college biology class. My instructor, Donald Defler, a gnomish balding man, paced at the front of the lecture hall and flipped on an overhead projector. He pointed to two diagrams that appeared on the wall behind him. They were schematics of the cell reproduction cycle, but to me they just looked like a neon-colored mess of arrows, squares, and circles with words I didn’t understand, like “MPF Triggering a Chain Reaction of Protein Activations.”

I was a kid who’d failed freshman year at the regular public high school because she never showed up. I’d transferred to an alternative school that offered dream studies instead of biology, so I was taking Defler’s class for high-school credit, which meant that I was sitting in a college lecture hall at sixteen with words like mitosis and kinase inhibitors flying around. I was completely lost.

“Do we have to memorize everything on those diagrams?” one student yelled.

Yes, Defler said, we had to memorize the diagrams, and yes, they’d be on the test, but that didn’t matter right then. What he wanted us to understand was that cells are amazing things: There are about one hundred trillion of them in our bodies, each so small that several thousand could fit on the period at the end of this sentence. They make up all our tissues—muscle, bone, blood—which in turn make up our organs.

Under the microscope, a cell looks a lot like a fried egg: It has a white (the cytoplasm) that’s full of water and proteins to keep it fed, and a yolk (the nucleus) that holds all the genetic information that makes you you. The cytoplasm buzzes like a New York City street. It’s crammed full of molecules and vessels endlessly shuttling enzymes and sugars from one part of the cell to another, pumping water, nutrients, and oxygen in and out of the cell. All the while, little cytoplasmic factories work 24/7, cranking out sugars, fats, proteins, and energy to keep the whole thing running and feed the nucleus. The nucleus is the brains of the operation; inside every nucleus within each cell in your body, there’s an identical copy of your entire genome. That genome tells cells when to grow and divide and makes sure they do their jobs, whether that’s controlling your heartbeat or helping your brain understand the words on this page.

Defler paced the front of the classroom telling us how mitosis—the process of cell division—makes it possible for embryos to grow into babies, and for our bodies to create new cells for healing wounds or replenishing blood we’ve lost. It was beautiful, he said, like a perfectly choreographed dance.

All it takes is one small mistake anywhere in the division process for cells to start growing out of control, he told us. Just one enzyme misfiring, just one wrong protein activation, and you could have cancer. Mitosis goes haywire, which is how it spreads.

“We learned that by studying cancer cells in culture,” Defler said. He grinned and spun to face the board, where he wrote two words in enormous print: HENRIETTA LACKS.

Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer, he told us. But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.

“Henrietta’s cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it,” Defler said. If we went to almost any cell culture lab in the world and opened its freezers, he told us, we’d probably find millions—if not billions—of Henrietta’s cells in small vials on ice.

Her cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease; and they’ve been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers. Their chromosomes and proteins have been studied with such detail and precision that scientists know their every quirk. Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta’s cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse.

“HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years,” Defler said.

Then, matter-of-factly, almost as an afterthought, he said, “She was a black woman.” He erased her name in one fast swipe and blew the chalk from his hands. Class was over.

As the other students filed out of the room, I sat thinking, That’s it? That’s all we get? There has to be more to the story.

I followed Defler to his office.

“Where was she from?” I asked. “Did she know how important her cells were? Did she have any children?”

“I wish I could tell you,” he said, “but no one knows anything about her.”

Educator Guide for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Classroom-based guides appropriate for schools and colleges provide pre-reading and classroom activities, discussion questions connected to the curriculum, further reading, and resources.

(Please note: the guide displayed here is the most recently uploaded version; while unlikely, any page citation discrepancies between the guide and book is likely due to pagination differences between a book’s different formats.)

First-Year Reading (FYR) Guide for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Designed specifically to be used by faculty or program facilitators for college First-Year Common Reading programs.

(Please note: the guide displayed here is the most recently uploaded version; while unlikely, any page citation discrepancies between the guide and book is likely due to pagination differences between a book’s different formats.)

Discussion Guide for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Provides questions, discussion topics, suggested reading lists, introductions and/or author Q&As, which are intended to enhance reading groups’ experiences.

(Please note: the guide displayed here is the most recently uploaded version; while unlikely, any page citation discrepancies between the guide and book is likely due to pagination differences between a book’s different formats.)

  • WINNER | 2011
    Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction
  • WINNER | 2011
    Audie Awards
  • WINNER | 2011
    Chicago Public Library and the Chicago Public Library Foundation 21st Century Award
  • WINNER | 2011
    National Academy of Sciences Book Award
  • WINNER | 2011
    Powells 2011 Puddly Award for Nonfiction
  • WINNER | 2011
    Audie Award for Best Nonfiction Audiobook
  • WINNER | 2011
    Ambassador Book Award in American Studies
  • WINNER | 2010
    Goodreads.com Readers Choice Award for Best Debut Author and Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
  • WINNER | 2010
    Medical Journalists' Association Open Book Award, General Readership, Non-Fiction
  • WINNER | 2010
    Wellcome Trust Book Prize
  • WINNER | 2010
    2010 Indie Lit Award for NonFiction
  • WINNER | 2010
    Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize
  • WINNER | 2010
    Bookbrowse.com Diamond Award for Best Book
  • WINNER | 2010
    Audie Awards
  • WINNER | 2010
    American Association for the Advancement of Science's Young Adult Science Book Award
“Skloot's vivid account begins with the life of Henrietta Lacks, who comes fully alive on the page. . . . Immortal Life reads like a novel.”The Washington Post

“Gripping . . . by turns heartbreaking, funny and unsettling . . . raises troubling questions about the way Mrs. Lacks and her family were treated by researchers and about whether patients should control or have financial claims on tissue removed from their bodies.”The New York Times

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a fascinating read and a ringing success. It is a well-written, carefully-researched, complex saga of medical research, bioethics, and race in America. Above all it is a human story of redemption for a family, torn by loss, and for a writer with a vision that would not let go.”The Boston Globe

“Riveting . . . raises important questions about medical ethics . . . It's an amazing story. . . . Deeply chilling . . . Whether those uncountable HeLa cells are a miracle or a violation, Skloot tells their fascinating story at last with skill, insight and compassion.”—Colette Bancroft, St. Petersburg Times

“The history of HeLa is a rare and powerful combination of race, class, gender, medicine, bioethics, and intellectual property; far more rare is the writer than can so clearly fuse those disparate threads into a personal story so rich and compelling. Rebecca Skloot has crafted a unique piece of science journalism that is impossible to put down—or to forget.”Seed magazine

“The issues evoked here are giant: who owns our bodies, the use and misuse of medical authority, the unhealed wounds of slavery . . . and Skloot, with clarity and compassion, helps us take the long view. This is exactly the sort of story that books were made to tell—thorough, detailed, quietly passionate, and full of revelation.”—Ted Conover, author of Newjack and The Routes of Man

“It’s extremely rare when a reporter’s passion finds its match in a story. Rarer still when the people in that story courageously join that reporter in the search for what we most need to know about ourselves. This is an extraordinary gift of a book, beautiful and devastating—a work of outstanding literary reportage.”—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks brings to mind the work of Philip K. Dick and Edgar Allan Poe. But this tale is true. This is an extraordinary book, haunting and beautifully told.”—Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation

“Writing with a novelist’s artistry, a biologist’s expertise, and the zeal of an investigative reporter, Skloot tells a truly astonishing story of racism and poverty, science and conscience, spirituality and family driven by a galvanizing inquiry into the sanctity of the body and the very nature of the life force.”Booklist, starred review

“A rich, resonant tale of modern science, the wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit society’s most vulnerable people.”Publishers Weekly, starred review

The Official Book Trailer

About

Winner of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine’s 2011 Communication Award for Best Book
Winner of the 2010 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of the 2010 Wellcome Trust Book Prize
Named by more than 60 critics as one of the best books of 2010,
including:
A Best Book of the Year at: O, The Oprah Magazine, Publishers Weekly,
Library Journal, Bookmarks Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist,
Entertainment Weekly, East Bay Express, and Kansas City Star
A Discover Magazine 2010 Must Read
National Public Radio, Best of the Bestsellers

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 were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb; helped lead to important advances in cloning, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions, with devastating consequences for her family.

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 Henrietta’s children, unable to afford health insurance, wrestle with feelings of pride, fear, and betrayal.


Praise for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks...

“Thanks to Rebecca Skloot’s remarkable book, the Lacks case is likely to become a classic in the history of biomedical ethics. . . Skloot is a science journalist but this book also evidences her skill as a historian . . . provides a profound sense of history. Students in classes covering ethics, public health, and the history of medicine, childhood, the family, women, the 1950s, and race will be engrossed by Lacks’s story. The many questions raised by the existence and use of HeLa cells will generate hours of classroom discussion.” —Journal of the History of Medicine
"What is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks really about? Science, African American culture and religion, intellectual property of human tissues, Southern history, medical ethics, civil rights, the overselling of medical advances? . . . The book’s broad scope would make it ideal for an institution-wide freshman year reading program." —David J. Kroll, Professor and Chair, Pharmaceutical Sciences, North Carolina Central University

"An incredibly readable and smart text that should be a part of countless university discussions . . . Ethically fascinating and completely engaging–I couldn’t recommend it more." —Deborah Blum, Helen Firstbrook Franklin Professor of Journalism, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"A stunning illustration of how race, gender and disease intersect to produce a unique form of social vulnerability, this is a poignant, necessary and brilliant book." —Alondra Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology, Columbia University

"An essential component of biomedical research, Skloot finally gives the HeLa cell line its human face. HeLa grew from a tissue sample taken from a highly aggressive cancerous tumor on the cervix of 31-year-old Henrietta Lacks, a young, African-American mother, the child of tobacco farmers, and the granddaughter of slaves, who died a painful death in the colored ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951. She never gave permission for the sample to be taken; in turn, her cells have reproduced geometrically and scientists estimate that over 50 million metric tons of cells—as much as one hundred Empire State Buildings—have been grown since 1951. Skloot (a regular contributor to Popular Science ) offers a detailed and dramatic medical detective story, effectively balancing careful, scientific reporting with intense and respectful interactions with Lacks’s extended family. The brutal irony of Lacks’s life is that though her early death did not allow her to mother her own children, her cells and the medical miracles they engendered (polio vaccines, DNA research, and more) effectively mothered us all." —School Library Journal

Students Respond to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks:
"Unlike the stereotypical reading assignment that too often catalyzes students to bond over mutual dislike," writes Connecticut College student Jesse Neikrie in the Association of American Colleges and Universities magazine, "[The Immortal Life] appealed to people with diverse interests, including literature, science, history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, medicine, and social justice." For full article go to: http://tinyurl.com/5uyzqvz.

“If there ever was a piece of scholarship that encapsulated the interdisciplinary ideals and methods of American Studies,” writes Connecticut College student Claire Cafritz, “Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks would be it.” For full article go to: http://tinyurl.com/6gzsjbv.

Selected for Common Reading at nearly 150 colleges, universities and “One Book, One City” Reads, including:
Adelphi University
Agnes State College
Albion College
Armstrong Atlantic State University
Auburn University
Austin College
Bard College
Barry University School of Law
Barton College
Baton Rouge’s ‘One Book One Community’ Read
Belmont University
Beloit College
Boise State Campus Reads
Bookpal for Brother's College
Brooklyn College
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland State University Ohio
Coastal Carolina University
CC Allegheny County - North Campus
College of St. Scholastica
Community College of Baltimore County
Connecticut College
Cosumnes River College, One Book CRC
Cox College
Daniel Boone Regional Library
Dayton Big Read
Delaware County Community College
Delaware Valley College
Detroit Public Library
Earlham College
East Carolina University
Eastern Illinois University
Eastern Oregon University
Elizabethtown College
Emmanuel College
Fairmont State University
Florida Atlantic University Honors College
Florida State University
Follett Pioneer Bookstore California State University East Bay
Framingham State University
Frederick Country Reads
Gallaudet University
George Washington University
Georgia Institute of Technology
Grand Valley State University
Green River Community College
Greenville High School
Grossmont College
Gwynedd-Mercy College
Hamilton College
Hampton University
Hanover College
Henderson State University
Hesston College
Honors College at University of Arizona
Johns Hopkins University
Johnson County Community College
Kansas State University
Keene State College
Marian University
Marietta College
Marshall University
Maryville University
Massachusetts College of Art
Merced College
Metropolitan State College of Denver
Mills College
Missouri State University
Montclair State University
Moraine Valley Community College
Morehouse School of Medicine
Morgan State University
Mountain View College
North Carolina Agriculture and Technical University
North Carolina State University
Northwestern (Bookpal for Northwestern)
Northwestern University
Norwich University
Ohio State Mansfield & North Central State College
Ohio State University
Otterbein College
Pellissippi State Tech. Community College
Penn State Brandywine
Philadelphia University
Purdue University
Purdue University
Purdue University Calumet
Queensborough Community College
Randolph-Macon Academy
Regis University
Rhode Island: One Book, One State
Rochester Community and Technical College
Roger Williams University
Rollins College
Roosevelt University
Rowan University
Saint Francis University
Saint Xavier University
Sam Houston State University
San Diego State University
San Jose State University
Seton Hall University
Shepherd University
Smith College
Southern Methodist University
St. Ambrose University
St. Bonaventure University
St. Cloud University
St. Mary’s Episcopal School
SUNY Cortland
Sweet Briar College
Texas Christian University
Transylvania University
Tulane Freshmen Reads
UCLA
University of Alabama Birmingham
University of Arkansas
University of California Santa Barbara
University of California, Merced
University of Charleston
University of Delaware
University of Florida Honors Program
University of Houston Downtown
University of Kansas School of Medicine
University of Maryland
University of Mississippi
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
University of Rhode Island
University of Richmond One Book, One Campus Program
University of South Carolina Upstate
University of Tennessee
University of Texas Arlington
University of West Florida
University of Wisconsin Platteville
University of Wisconsin, Madison Big Reads
Virginia Commonwealth University
West Shore Community College
Western Michigan University
Western Washington University
Worcester State University

For a full list, email us at rhacademic@randomhouse.com

Also visit the blog post by Case Western professor, Jacqueline D. Lipton, Professor; Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research; Co-Director of the Center for Law Technology and the Arts; Associate Director of the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center.
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2010/03/the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks.html

To read Rebecca Skloot's conversation with Open Notebook's David Dobbs on writing creative non-fiction, go to: http://tiny.cc/ihzgv

You may find all links listed in the Related Links tab to your right.

Author

© Manda Townsend

REBECCA SKLOOT is an award-winning science writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; and many others. She is coeditor of The Best American Science Writing 2011 and has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s Radiolab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW. She was named one of five surprising leaders of 2010 by the Washington Post. Skloot's debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, took more than a decade to research and write, and instantly became a New York Times bestseller. It was chosen as a best book of 2010 by more than sixty media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly, People, and the New York Times. It is being translated into more than twenty-five languages, adapted into a young reader edition, and being made into an HBO film produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball. Skloot is the founder and president of The Henrietta Lacks Foundation. She has a B.S. in biological sciences and an MFA in creative nonfiction. She has taught creative writing and science journalism at the University of Memphis, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University. She lives in Chicago. For more information, visit her website at RebeccaSkloot.com, where you’ll find links to follow her on Twitter and Facebook. 

View titles by Rebecca Skloot

Excerpt

PROLOGUE

The Woman in the Photograph

There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. It’s the late 1940s and she hasn’t yet reached the age of thirty. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her—a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.”

No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells—her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died.

Her real name is Henrietta Lacks.

I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever—bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.

There’s no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta’s cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they’d wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall.

I first learned about HeLa cells and the woman behind them in 1988, thirty-seven years after her death, when I was sixteen and sitting in a community college biology class. My instructor, Donald Defler, a gnomish balding man, paced at the front of the lecture hall and flipped on an overhead projector. He pointed to two diagrams that appeared on the wall behind him. They were schematics of the cell reproduction cycle, but to me they just looked like a neon-colored mess of arrows, squares, and circles with words I didn’t understand, like “MPF Triggering a Chain Reaction of Protein Activations.”

I was a kid who’d failed freshman year at the regular public high school because she never showed up. I’d transferred to an alternative school that offered dream studies instead of biology, so I was taking Defler’s class for high-school credit, which meant that I was sitting in a college lecture hall at sixteen with words like mitosis and kinase inhibitors flying around. I was completely lost.

“Do we have to memorize everything on those diagrams?” one student yelled.

Yes, Defler said, we had to memorize the diagrams, and yes, they’d be on the test, but that didn’t matter right then. What he wanted us to understand was that cells are amazing things: There are about one hundred trillion of them in our bodies, each so small that several thousand could fit on the period at the end of this sentence. They make up all our tissues—muscle, bone, blood—which in turn make up our organs.

Under the microscope, a cell looks a lot like a fried egg: It has a white (the cytoplasm) that’s full of water and proteins to keep it fed, and a yolk (the nucleus) that holds all the genetic information that makes you you. The cytoplasm buzzes like a New York City street. It’s crammed full of molecules and vessels endlessly shuttling enzymes and sugars from one part of the cell to another, pumping water, nutrients, and oxygen in and out of the cell. All the while, little cytoplasmic factories work 24/7, cranking out sugars, fats, proteins, and energy to keep the whole thing running and feed the nucleus. The nucleus is the brains of the operation; inside every nucleus within each cell in your body, there’s an identical copy of your entire genome. That genome tells cells when to grow and divide and makes sure they do their jobs, whether that’s controlling your heartbeat or helping your brain understand the words on this page.

Defler paced the front of the classroom telling us how mitosis—the process of cell division—makes it possible for embryos to grow into babies, and for our bodies to create new cells for healing wounds or replenishing blood we’ve lost. It was beautiful, he said, like a perfectly choreographed dance.

All it takes is one small mistake anywhere in the division process for cells to start growing out of control, he told us. Just one enzyme misfiring, just one wrong protein activation, and you could have cancer. Mitosis goes haywire, which is how it spreads.

“We learned that by studying cancer cells in culture,” Defler said. He grinned and spun to face the board, where he wrote two words in enormous print: HENRIETTA LACKS.

Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer, he told us. But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.

“Henrietta’s cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it,” Defler said. If we went to almost any cell culture lab in the world and opened its freezers, he told us, we’d probably find millions—if not billions—of Henrietta’s cells in small vials on ice.

Her cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease; and they’ve been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers. Their chromosomes and proteins have been studied with such detail and precision that scientists know their every quirk. Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta’s cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse.

“HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years,” Defler said.

Then, matter-of-factly, almost as an afterthought, he said, “She was a black woman.” He erased her name in one fast swipe and blew the chalk from his hands. Class was over.

As the other students filed out of the room, I sat thinking, That’s it? That’s all we get? There has to be more to the story.

I followed Defler to his office.

“Where was she from?” I asked. “Did she know how important her cells were? Did she have any children?”

“I wish I could tell you,” he said, “but no one knows anything about her.”

Guides

Educator Guide for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Classroom-based guides appropriate for schools and colleges provide pre-reading and classroom activities, discussion questions connected to the curriculum, further reading, and resources.

(Please note: the guide displayed here is the most recently uploaded version; while unlikely, any page citation discrepancies between the guide and book is likely due to pagination differences between a book’s different formats.)

First-Year Reading (FYR) Guide for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Designed specifically to be used by faculty or program facilitators for college First-Year Common Reading programs.

(Please note: the guide displayed here is the most recently uploaded version; while unlikely, any page citation discrepancies between the guide and book is likely due to pagination differences between a book’s different formats.)

Discussion Guide for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Provides questions, discussion topics, suggested reading lists, introductions and/or author Q&As, which are intended to enhance reading groups’ experiences.

(Please note: the guide displayed here is the most recently uploaded version; while unlikely, any page citation discrepancies between the guide and book is likely due to pagination differences between a book’s different formats.)

Awards

  • WINNER | 2011
    Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction
  • WINNER | 2011
    Audie Awards
  • WINNER | 2011
    Chicago Public Library and the Chicago Public Library Foundation 21st Century Award
  • WINNER | 2011
    National Academy of Sciences Book Award
  • WINNER | 2011
    Powells 2011 Puddly Award for Nonfiction
  • WINNER | 2011
    Audie Award for Best Nonfiction Audiobook
  • WINNER | 2011
    Ambassador Book Award in American Studies
  • WINNER | 2010
    Goodreads.com Readers Choice Award for Best Debut Author and Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
  • WINNER | 2010
    Medical Journalists' Association Open Book Award, General Readership, Non-Fiction
  • WINNER | 2010
    Wellcome Trust Book Prize
  • WINNER | 2010
    2010 Indie Lit Award for NonFiction
  • WINNER | 2010
    Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize
  • WINNER | 2010
    Bookbrowse.com Diamond Award for Best Book
  • WINNER | 2010
    Audie Awards
  • WINNER | 2010
    American Association for the Advancement of Science's Young Adult Science Book Award

Praise

“Skloot's vivid account begins with the life of Henrietta Lacks, who comes fully alive on the page. . . . Immortal Life reads like a novel.”The Washington Post

“Gripping . . . by turns heartbreaking, funny and unsettling . . . raises troubling questions about the way Mrs. Lacks and her family were treated by researchers and about whether patients should control or have financial claims on tissue removed from their bodies.”The New York Times

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a fascinating read and a ringing success. It is a well-written, carefully-researched, complex saga of medical research, bioethics, and race in America. Above all it is a human story of redemption for a family, torn by loss, and for a writer with a vision that would not let go.”The Boston Globe

“Riveting . . . raises important questions about medical ethics . . . It's an amazing story. . . . Deeply chilling . . . Whether those uncountable HeLa cells are a miracle or a violation, Skloot tells their fascinating story at last with skill, insight and compassion.”—Colette Bancroft, St. Petersburg Times

“The history of HeLa is a rare and powerful combination of race, class, gender, medicine, bioethics, and intellectual property; far more rare is the writer than can so clearly fuse those disparate threads into a personal story so rich and compelling. Rebecca Skloot has crafted a unique piece of science journalism that is impossible to put down—or to forget.”Seed magazine

“The issues evoked here are giant: who owns our bodies, the use and misuse of medical authority, the unhealed wounds of slavery . . . and Skloot, with clarity and compassion, helps us take the long view. This is exactly the sort of story that books were made to tell—thorough, detailed, quietly passionate, and full of revelation.”—Ted Conover, author of Newjack and The Routes of Man

“It’s extremely rare when a reporter’s passion finds its match in a story. Rarer still when the people in that story courageously join that reporter in the search for what we most need to know about ourselves. This is an extraordinary gift of a book, beautiful and devastating—a work of outstanding literary reportage.”—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks brings to mind the work of Philip K. Dick and Edgar Allan Poe. But this tale is true. This is an extraordinary book, haunting and beautifully told.”—Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation

“Writing with a novelist’s artistry, a biologist’s expertise, and the zeal of an investigative reporter, Skloot tells a truly astonishing story of racism and poverty, science and conscience, spirituality and family driven by a galvanizing inquiry into the sanctity of the body and the very nature of the life force.”Booklist, starred review

“A rich, resonant tale of modern science, the wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit society’s most vulnerable people.”Publishers Weekly, starred review

Media

The Official Book Trailer

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