The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Someone in my book club recommended we read "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot.  If I am perfectly honest, I wasn't overly excited about the choice.  I was worried there would be a lot of medical terms that I would not understand.  What I found, however, was a nonfiction book that pulls you in and reads like fiction.

Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year old woman when she died of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital.  She was the mother of five children ages 11-months to 16-years at her death. 

One of my greatest fears has always been that I would die and my children would not remember me or even really know me.  I felt so drawn to Henrietta because my fear was her reality.

I learned a much more remarkable thing about Henrietta's death:  her cells (HELA) continued to live way beyond her 1951 death.  A doctor at Johns Hopkins took some of Henrietta's cells without either Henrietta's or her family's consent, and those cells were used in research studies at Johns Hopkins.  Remarkably, the cells also continued to divide and live on, something I don't completely understand, but was clearly amazing to the scientists who possessed the HELA cells.  The cells were then shared, although it is unclear if they were bought and sold, with other scientists at other institutions. 

The HELA cells were used in countless studies over the years, and her family never knew.  Even more remarkable, her family never received any monetary benefit of any kind over the many years that HELA cells were used.  That information itself does not upset me as much as the fact that her children were so poor they could not afford medical care.  Their mother's cells were used to advance medicine in so many ways, and they could not afford prescriptions for heart, stroke, and kidney diseases. 
I find that so sad and so unforgivable.  If Henrietta were alive to give her consent, if she had said, "Yes, take my cells but always take care of my babies", would the outcome really be any different?  Not likely.  And that too makes me very sad. 

All I can do now all these years later, upon my discovery of Henrietta Lacks and HELA cells, is to tell others about this amazing book, this amazing chapter in the history of science and medicine.  And hope that others read it, learn from it, and never allow such a travesty of justice to occur again in the name of science and medicine.

Thank you, Henrietta, for sharing yourself with all the world.