Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Rebecca Skloot.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the interveiw: The thriving pharmaceutical industries, modern medical breakthroughs and increased dependency on prescription medicine have captured much media and academic interests lately. Rebecca Skloot’s acclaimed book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks contributes to this discourse. It incisively weaves issues related to gender, race and class with health, medical practice myth, art, miracle, history and science and exposes the benefits and abuse of medical advances. At the center of this book is Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman who died in 1951 of cervical cancer, but the cells from the deadly tumor that were taken without her knowledge or consent live on. “HeLa,” the term scientists used to name her miraculously productive cell line, would propel to fame numerous laboratories, scientists and scholars creating a multi-billion dollar industry.