Rebecca Skloot

Wow - how in the world did I wait so long to read this? This book was mind blowing and powerful - as someone who doesn't easily grasp science - I had a firm grip on what I was reading. Written as narrative non-fiction, Rebecca Skloot does an amazing job chronicling the tragically short life of Henrietta Lacks, the ethics of taking her cells, the science and amazing discovery from her cells, and the aftermath when her family finds out more than two decades after her death that pieces of their show more mother still live on all over the world. Rebecca did a fantastic job not only with the moral dilemmas, but with the racial component too. I learned SOO MUCH out of this. I hate science. but I loved this book. I'm so glad that Henrietta Lacks finally got the recognition as well as her family for all that they went through. Fascinating stuff. show less

In the 1950s, a poor African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins hospital for treatment of cervical cancer. Without her knowledge, some of her cancerous cells were scraped from her body, put into culture, and grown. As her cells multiplied at astounding rates, they were distributed throughout the country and came to be influential in many medical research studies from creating the polio vaccine to mapping DNA. Meanwhile, her children suffered the loss of their mother show more at a young age and consequently grew up in poverty and abuse, lacking education and health care. Science writer Rebecca Skloot made it her mission to get Henrietta's story told and her decades of research lead to this book.

This was such a fantastic read. It was thought-provoking and led to many questions that lack easy answers (particularly those related to biomedical ethics) and no clear-cut "bad guys." It is scientific and though some of that science was a bit over my head, the book is not bogged down with excessive details that are too hard to understand. Skloot also provides a great deal of historical details to place everything into context. And last but certainly not least, the Lacks family plays a large role in the book, making the book ultimately a human story of suffering and of hope.

The book is not told strictly in chronological order, but it flows in a way that makes perfect sense. I was very impressed with the writing and the storytelling. After years of hearing hype about this book, I was a little bit hesitant that it would not be able to live up to that, but it did and then some.

Photographs, extensive notes, a timeline, and other back matter make for a well-rounded nonfiction book that allows the reader to examine more on their own if desired. show less

This book was stupendous. Henrietta Lacks' story was both sad and angering. The treatment she underwent for her tumor seems barbaric now, though it was state of the art then. And it's hard not to see the researchers as callous, caring more about the tumor cells than the woman.

Rebecca Skloot spent many years writing this book, and the detail is wonderful. She paints a sympathetic picture of Henrietta's family and what they went through during Henrietta's life and after her death. She is show more unflinching in her descriptions of the hair-raising things that researchers did to other people in the name of science.

In the end there are no pat resolutions on the subject of medical ethics, tissue rights, etc. There is plenty of food for thought, though.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I'm glad my sister made me read it. show less

Science writer Rebecca Sloot dives into a study of medical ethics in the United States, (and the lack thereof), in this book about the theft of the HeLa cells, taken without consent or knowledge from the cancer ridden body of Henrietta Lacks, (an impoverished, thirty year old black mother of small children who was wracked with cervical cancer), while she was in the hospital for treatment. Her family was distressed. "Everybody always says Henrietta Lacks donated those cells but she didn't show more donate nothing. They took them and didn't ask."

Since 1951, the study of Henrietta's duable, prolific cells, (the first immortal cell line), led to breakthroughs in research and trials from the polio vaccine to in vitro fertilization, gene mapping, and cloning.

Henrietta was a pilfered pioneer; her cells sold to medical labs the world over, made millions of dollars for medical industry, but those profiting failed to inform, obtain consent, or compensate Henrietta's family, who were repeatedly lied to by doctors. The family was horror stricken when, decades later, they found out their mother's cells were being kept alive in labs, sent into outer space, and put through countless trials; they wondered if Henrietta's soul was suffering from these scientific experiements.

"Hopkins say they gave them cells away," Lawrence, yelled, "but they made millions. It's not fair! She's the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can't we get health insurance?" The family never got a penny of the prodigious profit.

Skloot's book is a primarily a buddy story; the relationship is between the writer and Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, who grew up without her mother. Rebecca skillfully juggles a tale that features a history of rascism, poverty, and more as it relates to medical exploitation, along with the story of Deborah and the other Lackes as they struggle to make sense of what was done to their mother.

Another example of a biological patent appropriated without permission that Skloot includes in the book is that of John Moore. Moore had a rare cancer called hairy-cell Leukemia. His cells made rare proteins that could contribute to cancer therapies and the development of an AIDS vaccine.

Drug companies were willing to pay enormous sums to work with Moore's cells. Dr. David Golde, a cancer researcher at UCLA, told Moore he had to have his spleen removed and his tissue would be cremated. Golde, however, had entered into agreements with a biotech company that gave him stocks and financing worth more than $3.5 million to "commercially develop" and "scientifically investigate" the Mo cell line. At that point it's market value was estimated to be $3 billion.

"It was very dehumanizing to be thought of as Mo, to be referred to as Mo in the medical records: 'Saw Mo today' All of a sudden I was not the man Golde was putting his arm around, I was Mo, I was the cell line, like a piece of meat."

The idea of patient consent is a misleading formality overall. "The term informed consent first appeared in a document in 1957, in a civil court ruling on a patient named Martin Slago. He went under anesthesia for what he thought was a routine procedure and woke up permanently paralyzed from the waist down. The doctor hadn't told him the procedure carried any risks at all. The judge ruled against the doctor saying, "A physician violates his duty to the patient and subjects himself to liability if he withholds any facts which are necessary to form the basis of an intelligent consent by the patient to the proposed treatment. He wrote that there needed to be full disclosure of facts necessary to an informed consent."

Lack of honesty in the so-called medical consent process has created a profusion of problems for the public who rely on medical professionals to be fully candid and careful, not cavalier cons. As a patient safety activist, this story riled me up and raised even more questions about the medical industry than I had before. show less