The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

In 1951, a young Black woman named Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital with cervical cancer. During her treatment, a sample of her tumor cells was taken without her knowledge or consent. Henrietta died within months, at the age of thirty-one. Her cells did not. They became the first human cells to survive and multiply indefinitely in a laboratory — a line scientists named HeLa — and they went on to become one of the most important tools in the history of medicine.

HeLa cells helped develop the polio vaccine. They were sent into space. They were used in research on cancer, AIDS, gene mapping, and countless other breakthroughs. They have been bought and sold by the billions. And for decades, the Lacks family knew nothing about any of it. They could not afford health insurance while a multi-billion-dollar industry profited from their mother's biology.

Rebecca Skloot spent over a decade researching this story, and she tells it on three interleaving tracks: the science of HeLa cells and their extraordinary contribution to medicine; the life and death of Henrietta Lacks, a vibrant, loving woman erased from her own legacy; and the story of the Lacks family, particularly Henrietta's daughter Deborah, who spent her life trying to understand what had happened to her mother. The book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction — part scientific detective story, part meditation on race, ethics, and the human body as property.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks earns its place because it is the rare book that operates simultaneously as great science writing, great social justice writing, and great storytelling. Skloot achieved what few nonfiction writers manage: she made cellular biology gripping, she made a forgotten woman visible, and she exposed a profound ethical failure without turning the story into a simple morality tale.

The book forces readers to confront deeply uncomfortable questions. Who owns your body? When a tissue sample taken from your body leads to scientific breakthroughs worth billions, do you — or your family — have any claim to the profits or even the knowledge? These were not hypothetical questions for the Lacks family, who learned about HeLa cells from a journalist rather than from any of the researchers who had used them.

Skloot also tells a story about race and medicine that America needs to hear. The history of medical experimentation on Black bodies without consent — from the Tuskegee syphilis study to Henrietta Lacks — is not ancient history. It is the reason many Black Americans distrust the medical establishment today. Skloot renders that history with the specificity and emotional weight it demands. This is a book that changes how you think about science, ethics, and whose stories get told.

Published in 2010, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks spent over six years on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than 3 million copies. It was adapted into an HBO film in 2017 starring Oprah Winfrey as Deborah Lacks. The book catalyzed a national conversation about bioethics, consent, and racial disparities in medicine. In 2013, the NIH reached an agreement with the Lacks family granting them some control over access to HeLa cell genome data. Johns Hopkins, which had long benefited from HeLa research, named a building in Henrietta's honor. The book is now widely assigned in biology, ethics, journalism, and African American studies courses. It is credited with bringing the issue of informed consent in medical research to mainstream public awareness and with finally giving Henrietta Lacks the recognition she was denied in life.