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 tube...