Our bodies, our cells.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Book review

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By Rebecca Skloot

Crown. 369 pages. $26.

T here are a handful of journalists who have such a deep capacity for empathy that they can become fully absorbed into their subjects' lives, gaining their confidence and crossing huge divides of race, culture, class, and geography to tell a story of transcendent humanity.

This is what Rebecca Skloot, a science writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and Popular Science , and on NOVA , has done in her first book, a nonfiction masterpiece.

In artfully constructed chapters that zoom forward and backward in time, Skloot tells two interlocking stories. The first is a biography of an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, whose death from cervical cancer in 1951 changed the course of her family members' lives for generations. The second is a biography of a different kind: the story of Lacks's "immortal" cells, which became central to scientific breakthroughs in medicine on every front, from polio to AIDS to cancer to the Ebola virus to cloning and the diagnosis of genetic disorders and the mapping of the human genome.

HeLa cells (named for the first two letters of Lacks's first and last names) were unique in history. They were the first to become "immortal"--to thrive and reproduce in labs, as they do to this day--after her doctors took a sample from the unwitting Lacks while she lay dying on a Johns Hopkins Hospital bed.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks traces the rise of cell research fueled by HeLa and the concurrent decline of Lacks's family after her death.

Skloot paints the racial and economic injustice that left Lacks's family members without basic health care, even as researchers' careers took off and a whole burgeoning multibillion dollar biotech field arose from Lacks's immortal cells.

In a narrative that reads like detective fiction--with colorful characters and breathtaking plot twists--Skloot takes readers on a wild ride through sharecropper shacks, urban slums, and cutting-edge biotech research facilities. She discovers what happened to Henrietta Lacks and her children, and what it means for their family and the larger community, as well as scientific and ethical standards that remain murky to this day.

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Skloot uses a combination of scientific expertise, sheer doggedness, and immense compassion to pull off the huge feat of writing this book. She befriends the Lacks family, overcoming their suspicion and...