There was so much buzz about this book when it came out earlier this year that I assume you know all about it already, but just in case: Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black working-class woman who died agonizingly of cervical cancer in Baltimore in 1951. Before her death, without her knowledge, doctors at Johns Hopkins took a sample of cancerous cells from her tumor and ended up using them as the source for the first-ever line of human cells that could survive and grow in a laboratory culture. Her cells, christened HeLa, spread across the globe, becoming the go-to resource for medical research, from testing the polio vaccine to being shot into space. For a long time, Lacks’s husband and children had no idea any of this was happening, and few members of the scientific community or the public knew the truth about where the cells came from. In her painstakingly researched book, Rebecca Skloot sets the record straight, providing the full story of Henrietta Lacks, her cells’ massive contributions to science, and her family’s struggle to discover and understand what really happened to their mother.
I tend to avoid trendy books, at least until the buzz dies down and I can get a better sense of their enduring value, mostly just to save myself some time—I would read almost every book I could get my hands on if given the opportunity, but life is only so long and I already have a to-be-read list that approaches 100 items, so I need to be judicious sometimes. Immortal Life sounded interesting to me, but so do a lot of nonfiction books, and then where do you stop? Luckily, I met someone at a party who had just listened to it as an audiobook and highly recommended it. Of course! This was the perfect solution for me, since I could still get the content without having to devote precious reading time to it. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a huge audiobook fan, but I do better with the nonfiction ones because I’m already conditioned to listening to factual content on NPR, and the books just feel like long news stories. And Immortal Life was an absolutely riveting listen, like a 10-hour episode of This American Life. I listened to it everywhere I drove for the next few weeks, not just on my daily commute but on my way to friends’ houses or while running errands. Lacks’s story is amazing, and Skloot tells it with intelligence, sensitivity, restraint, and grace, particularly as she details her interactions with the surviving members of the family and her rollercoaster friendship with Lacks’s daughter, Rebecca. The book is informative, entertaining, and moving, an addictive mixture of biography, medical history and ethics, science, race and class issues, and investigative reporting. I highly recommend it, whether in paper or audio form. It’s so good, it would have been well worth my precious reading time.
(As a trivial but amusing aside, I was surprised to learn, during a chapter on the history of cell culturing, that Bill Cosby’s “Chicken Heart” routine, which I listened to over and over again on the record player as a kid, was based on a real radio show about a chicken heart that ate New York City, which was in turn based on a real quack scientist who claimed to be keeping chicken heart cells alive in culture. You can’t make this stuff up, apparently.)
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