The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks.

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.
• Position: Book review

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

BY REBECCA SKLOOT

CROWN PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK

2010, 369 PAGES, $26.00

Who do you belong to? Who owns you?

Who do you belong to? Who owns you? Who has a right to buy and sell you, or a piece of you? If your routine annual blood tests indicate an anomaly of some kind, can your doctor, or the lab itself, keep a bit to use in experiments? Can they grow more of your cells and study them? What happens if they make a fortune out of pieces of you? How often do many of us willingly pert with a small scraping or a few drops of ourselves and trust that those bits will be used solely to help us be healthy?. How do we know that our parts belong to us? Is this an obvious fact, or could there be a bleaker truth?

From the era of segregation and the subhuman treatment of African-Americans in the U.S. to ongoing court cases concerning unauthorized cell-gathering for research, the story of Henrietta Lacks and her family is heartrending and befuddling--the former because the story of medical mistreatment, spousal abuse, heartache, and suffering cannot help but be moving; the latter because, to a reader raised in the luxury of a middle class world and indoctrinated in strict professional ethical codes, the patient's well-being always is placed first.

Skloot skillfully varies her storytelling between the story of the science and the tremendous research benefits from the cells first harvested from Lacks while she was dying of cancer in 1951, to the story of a...