About Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot’s book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” published in 2010, is the nonfiction account of a Southern black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951. While she was being treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, a surgeon removed samples of her tumor without her knowledge. Unlike all other cell samples that had been taken from humans, Henrietta Lacks’ cell samples didn’t die off. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.

In the prologue, Skloot mused about what Lacks would think if she knew what became of the cells she unknowingly contributed.

“I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization,” Skloot wrote.

But Lacks’ children and grandchildren didn’t benefit from her contribution to medical science, and when Skloot was working on her book most of Lacks’ family was living in poverty.

Skloot wrote about how Lacks’ son Sonny had a quintuple bypass in 2003. As he went under, he heard a doctor telling him that his mother’s cells were among the most important things that had ever happened to medicine. When Sonny woke up he was more than $125,000 in debt because he

didn’t have health insurance to cover the surgery.

Using some of the proceeds from her book, Skloot established a foundation to help the Lacks family. Information is available online at HenriettaLacksFoundation.org.