Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Good book; good discussion. Rebecca Skloot ably presents a story that spans decades, changing values, and a spectrum of emotions. It's a story of scientific discovery intersecting with family tragedy. And while readers somewhat know the end of the story, our understanding unfolds in much the same fashion as the truth about Henrietta's cells dawns on the Lacks family.


Rebecca Skloot's color-coded system for arranging the three narratives.

The author's interest in Henrietta Lacks as the source of the famous HeLa cell line began in high school, and she tracked it for more than a decade. The tale could have been told in an unwieldy and dry consecutive order. Skloot chose to "braid" three narratives: the life of Henrietta and her family, the scientific legacy, and her own involvement in bringing the family and Henrietta's cells together. The chapters are brief, and the story moves back and forth between threads. What's remarkable is how what she leaves us with at the end of one chapter leads to the subject of the next, although the timeframes can be separated by many years.

Skloot explains her writing process -- years of research followed by years of writing and rewriting -- in this YouTube video. In this interview, she also discusses her process and the decision to insert herself into the narrative. (Her rationale turns out to be much more sound and her technique more skillful than that of Mary Roach; here the "intrusion" helps tell the story, while in Stiff  it hinders.) There's another lengthy interview with the author here.

Our discussion revolved around our own impressions and some of the questions provided on the author's website. We were interested in the issue of informed consent, and also on the history of science. We remarked on how uneven and tainted the progress of knowledge has been. Critics like to blame religion for many wrongs, but what they replace it with is hardly pure, as we've also seen in Stiff and The Genius Factory. There's an allusion to another of our past reading subjects, Charles Lindbergh, in his dubious connection with eugenist Alexis Carrel (he of the "immortal" chicken liver).

The science could have gotten heavy, but this nonfiction book reads like a mystery novel. Because I don't want to forget why Henrietta's cells are so remarkable, why they still make news, I'll close with the explanation here:

Scientists knew from studying HeLa that cancer cells could divide indefinitely, and they'd speculated for years about whether cancer was caused by an error in the mechanism that made cells die when they reached their Hayflick Limit [the lifespan of normal cells being preprogrammed]. They also knew that there was a string of DNA at the end of each chormosome called a telomere, which shortened a tiny bit each time a cell divided, like time ticking off a clock. As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they're almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer time our cells have left to divide before they die.

By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa's immortality: telomerase constantly rewound the ticking clock at the end of Henrietta's chromosomes so they never grew old and never died. It was this immortality, and the strength with which Henrietta's cells grew, that made it possible for HeLa to take over so many other cultures -- they simply outlived and outgrew any other cells they encountered.

Another mystery solved: The Lacks Cancer Center at St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Rapids, MI, is not named for Henrietta but Richard J. Lacks, a prominent area businessman. In 1999, his family pledged $10 million toward the construction of the new center if the hospital raised addition funds.