The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Sklott

In the Prologue to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, author Rebecca Skloot describes an old photograph of a pretty, fearless-looking young woman with light brown skin. It is a picture of Henrietta Lacks, who died of cervical cancer in 1951. A few months before her death, a doctor cut out a small sample of her cancer cells, which became the first and most important line of human cells ever to survive and multiply indefinitely in the laboratory environment. Her cells have helped scientists make some of the most important advances in modern medical history—but they were taken without her knowledge and without her permission.

Rebecca Skloot became interested in this story when, at the age of sixteen, she enrolled in a community college biology class to fulfill a high school science requirement. Her teacher, Donald Defler, gave a lecture about the amazing qualities of human cells. In it, he mentioned that cell reproduction was “beautiful…like a perfectly choreographed dance.” He explained that even one mistake in this dance can cause cells to reproduce uncontrollably: cancer.

During his lecture, Defler told his class that when Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cancer, scientists had been trying and failing to make human cells reproduce in a laboratory for decades. For some reason, Henrietta’s cells were different. They survived and reproduced indefinitely in a tissue culture, becoming a cell line scientists named HeLa. HeLa cells have now lived outside Henrietta’s body longer than they lived inside it, and they are still helping researchers learn about human cells, to develop treatments for cancer, and to study countless other diseases.


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