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A review by wyvernfriend
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: The Young Reader's Edition by Gregory Mone, Rebecca Skloot
5.0
The story flips between the 1950s of Henrietta Lacks and the late 1990s early 2000s of the authors quest to find the story behind the cells that are so important to modern science, particularly medicine.
Henrietta Lacks was a poor black tobacco farmer in the south. A woman who was sure something was wrong but was ignored at first, and her cells harvested for what she thought was a test about her cancer but turned out to be part of a project to try to get cells to grow. Her cells turned out to be perfect, actually almost too perfect, they are actually invading other cultures!
She died of the cancer, her cells have gone on to be a multi-million dollar industry and her family have never seen anything from it, not even healthcare to any meaningful degree, all they've seen really has been things that have convinced them that indeed the medical industry in the US is discriminatory and cares more about the relationship they have with their famous mother's cells than about them.
It's an indictment of the way people are treated and a sad comment on how one woman, poor, black and ill-treated by life, was so failed during her life but has given so much back to science. A woman they even forgot or called by the wrong name for years. A woman who should never be forgotten.
It's worth the read, even if there are some cringeworthy moments with Henrietta's Daughter Deborah but it does say a lot about the life Henrietta must have led. We can only hope that she will remain remembered and maybe, just maybe, achieve some sort of immortality outside her cells.
Henrietta Lacks was a poor black tobacco farmer in the south. A woman who was sure something was wrong but was ignored at first, and her cells harvested for what she thought was a test about her cancer but turned out to be part of a project to try to get cells to grow. Her cells turned out to be perfect, actually almost too perfect, they are actually invading other cultures!
She died of the cancer, her cells have gone on to be a multi-million dollar industry and her family have never seen anything from it, not even healthcare to any meaningful degree, all they've seen really has been things that have convinced them that indeed the medical industry in the US is discriminatory and cares more about the relationship they have with their famous mother's cells than about them.
It's an indictment of the way people are treated and a sad comment on how one woman, poor, black and ill-treated by life, was so failed during her life but has given so much back to science. A woman they even forgot or called by the wrong name for years. A woman who should never be forgotten.
It's worth the read, even if there are some cringeworthy moments with Henrietta's Daughter Deborah but it does say a lot about the life Henrietta must have led. We can only hope that she will remain remembered and maybe, just maybe, achieve some sort of immortality outside her cells.