Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The book is about the HeLa cells and the story of the person from whose malignant tumor these immortal cells originated. They were first of their kind as most cells would die in the culture medium soon after they were separated from the human body. The HeLa cells were revolutionary as at that time in 1950s scientists wanted such immortal cells to experiment with and did not know how to make cells immortal (which they do now). So HeLa (first 2 letters from the donor's first and last name) cells proved to be a boon at that time and saved several lives indirectly by helping scientists do research on them and come up with vaccines for diseases like Polio and several others. The cells were grown in the culture medium and sold for money to different labs all over the world. The book talks about the ethical issues that this led to and the rights of the patients and their kith and kin's over the profits that were made in the process. Henrietta Lacks was from rural Virginia. She developed Cervical cancer and was being treated in Johns Hopkins university hospital in Baltimore. The doctors took some part of her tumor tissues and gave to one research lab where it was found that the cells were unique in that they survived longer than any previously known cell line. It was labeled as HeLa. Scientists all over the world got access to the HeLa cells for their research and most of them did not even think about who was the actual person behind those cells. There were several articles written about HeLa but none could go as deep as this book does. Rebecca Skloot dedicated herself to write the story of Henrietta and her family. She managed to get an interview with Henrietta's daughter Debra and they became good friends in the process as Debra whole-heartedly wanted to help and in the process get to learn more about her mother and her younger sister's fate. The plight of the family was such that they did not comprehend why Henrietta's cells were famous. They were poor and wanted to get some benefit out of their mother's famous cells that researchers did not take permission from Henrietta's family to use for research and did not provide any share in the profits that were made out of celling their mother's cells. They felt being wronged. And that is the ethical issue that this book debates about if a human needs to be informed that their tissue (a discarded part of their body) will be made use of in some kind of research, will they have any rights to the profits made from the research if there is any, will it hinder the progress of science if there are too many laws defined about the use of tissues and royalties to be paid to the donors, etc.. As it stands today, there is no law requiring consent of patient about use of their tissues by researchers and there is no right that the patients can exercise on the profits made in the process. A nice book on the subject and first one on the topic of cell culture and cell immortality for me.

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