Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

This is a non-fiction book about the industry of growing and selling human cells and the moral and ethical implications of such an industry. The first human cells that survived for an extended period of time outside the body were those of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman in 1950s America. 

The subject matter sounded super interesting and it was to some degree. The author jumps back and forth in time between the 1950s, the present and the intervening period. This can be a bit confusing sometimes. It states at the beginning of each chapter what time period we are in, but your internal timeline so to speak gets difficult to manage. I was often confused as to who had already met who and what conversations had taken place before a given scene.

The author not only talks about the science and the ethical issues, but also deals with Henrietta’s family and their history and their feelings about the fact that Henrietta’s cells are living all over the world in countless test tubes now. This part was also interesting at points, but when describing research trips and the results (or lack thereof) derived from these trips I felt more like I was reading the author’s personal diary and not so much a book about cells. I feel like this part could have been trimmed down without the book losing too much content. 

The ethical questions this book poses are interesting, but as far as I recall, perhaps they are not dealt with “professionally” so to speak. We hear what Henrietta’s family has to say about it and I believe the author states some sort of opinion too, but I think it would have been nice to hear from some one dealing professionally with ethical guidelines in medicine for example. 

What I mostly think about from this book, is the fact that Henrietta’s oldest daughter Elsie, was sent to live in a mental institution when she was young and she subsequently died there. We get a glimpse of the horrible treatment she went through as a patient there, and for some reason that particular aspect of the story just breaks my heart every time I think about it. Of course mental institutions were not great places in the 1950s and countless people endured horrific conditions in places like these, but the account of Elsie just really hits home for me. Even though that is not the main point of the book. 

I gave this book 3 stars out of 5 on Goodreads.