The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

I heard this interview on NPR with the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot, and had to go out and order the book. (I found it on Amazon for a reasonable price and am currently awaiting its arrival in the mail.) One of the most important contributions to modern science and medicine and the common person knows very little about it. In 1951, a poor African-American woman in Baltimore was diagnosed with cervical cancer. While undergoing treatment, her doctor takes a tissue sample for George Gey, the head of tissue-culture research at Johns Hopkins. Gey had been trying to grow a line of human cells, for testing, and had been unsuccessful for almost 30 years. Apparently, it was pretty standard practice to take tissue samples from patients without permission and not yet an issue legally. Henrietta Lacks' cells are unique in that they were able to divide and replicate infinitely, thus allowing Gey to achieve his goal.

According to the interview on NPR, the first major disease treated using the HeLa (the name given to the cell line, using the first two letters of the "donor's" first and last name) cell line was polio. Jonas Salk used her cells to create and distribute his Polio Vaccine. The invention of which almost earned Salk his own national holiday in the United States. Though something we take for granted today, Polio was an epidemic in this country at the time and the vaccine was a true miracle.

"Ms. REBECCA SKLOOT (Author, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"): (Reading)
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." - from Book Probes: 'Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks' on
NPR.org

It seems amazing that the contribution from one person has led to so many
medical advances; that so many lives have been saved and hardly anyone outside
of the medical community knew her name. In fact, she is buried in a family plot
without a headstone and today, her children can't afford health insurance that
would allow them access to the medicines she helped develop. It was certainly
the genius of the scientists that created the cures, medicines, and vaccines but
how much of that would have been possible without her cells?

So, I am looking forward to reading Rebecca Skloot's book. The interview said she focuses
not only on the impact the HeLa cells had on the medical community, but also on
what that meant to her family when they discovered where the cells had come
from. The book took ten years to research and write, mostly due to the author
having to gain the trust of the Lacks Family. I'm also hoping the author's
writing style is easy to read and not full of medical descriptions I know very
little about.