The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.

What this book is about

Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman from Baltimore who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Without her knowledge or consent, cells taken from her tumor were cultured and became the first immortal human cell line — HeLa — and have since been used in virtually every major medical advance of the last seven decades. Rebecca Skloot spent years finding Henrietta's family, who had largely been kept in the dark, to tell the full story: Henrietta's life, her death, what her cells made possible, and what it cost her descendants — in privacy, in trust, in health — that the medical industry built a fortune on something taken from their mother without asking. A landmark work of narrative nonfiction about race, medicine, ethics, and the gap between what science gains and who pays.