The Penn Stater Magazine

Henrietta Lacks Gets Her Due

February 6, 2010 at 10:21 am Tina Hay Leave a comment

A few weeks ago I mentioned that the book I’m most looking forward to reading is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot.

I first heard about Skloot maybe five years ago, when our then-senior editor Maureen Harmon went to a writing conference in Pittsburgh and came back talking about a great session by Skloot (who I think was on the Pitt faculty at the time). Skloot had terrific advice on how to write about science for lay audiences.

She also struck us as a science writer worth keeping an eye on—someone we’d want to hire as a freelancer for The Penn Stater someday. A few years later I pitched a story idea to her and, while she wasn’t available to do it, she referred me to another science writer she recommended. And we’ve kept in touch via Facebook since then.

Anyway, one of the things Skloot had talked about in that Pittsburgh workshop was a book she was working on at the time—about a woman named Henrietta Lacks who had unwittingly changed the course of medical history.

Lacks was a poor woman from Virginia who sought treatment at Johns Hopkins for cervical cancer in 1951. Before she died, the Hopkins doctors took some samples of her cancerous cells—without her knowledge or permission—and propagated them in a Petri dish. The cells multiplied like no cells had ever done before, and ended up being used by researchers the world over. They played a role in the development of the polio vaccine, AIDS treatments, and many more medical discoveries.

And for decades, Lacks’ family had no idea about any of this.

To make a long story short, Skloot’s book—10 years in the making—is finally out. It was released earlier this week, and the acclaim it’s getting is just astounding. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book review as glowing as this one in the New York Times, for example, and that’s just one of three stories about the book in the Times this week. (Here is another one, in the Sunday Book Review section.)

Skloot also was the subject of a cover story in Publishers Weekly a few weeks ago, has been on NPR’s Fresh Air and on ABC’s World News, and will be on NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered today. And Popular Science did a piece on “Five Reasons Henrietta Lacks is the Most Important Woman in Medical History.”

I’m sure this is all beyond Skloot’s wildest dreams. And many people in the science writing community are thrilled that a science book can do so well (last I looked, it was No. 4 in the Amazon.com rankings)—although I get the sense that it’s so much more than a science book; there’s also history, ethics, and a compelling human-interest tale.

The copy I ordered arrived in the mail the other day, and I’m looking forward to digging in.

Tina Hay, editor

Entry filed under: The Penn Stater magazine. Tags: Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.