Rebecca Skloot's book should shock you. As the great wheel of America’s
attention moves race to the top again, the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor
black woman dying of cancer in 1951, whose tumor cells were harvested by the
hospital where she suffered and finally died, stands as an explosive example of
the power structure’s indifference to Americans whose ancestry is African. Not
only was she never asked for consent for the use of her tissues, her family
found out inadvertently many years after her death, when portions of her
medical records were quoted in news stories. Meanwhile, her cancer cells, of a
surreal potency, spawned a multi-million dollar industry as HeLa in medical research.
Her family did not benefit. Indeed, when researchers tracked
them down more than twenty years after Henrietta’s death to collect blood
samples - curious to see whether any of her progeny carried those unique cells
- they never explained their purpose nor followed up.
The enormity of this disrespect permeates the book. To read
in magazine articles about the autopsy of your mother, whom you barely
remember, is as profound an invasion as one can imagine. And when her children
battled to set the record straight - even her name was bowdlerized - they were
treated as an obstacle, a nuisance, people incapable of understanding and
therefore undeserving of explanations.
Skloot is not just a brave and tireless researcher, she is a
storyteller, building a narrative about a strong joyous woman, mother of five,
whose untimely death tore the stable center from their lives. Through
persistence and dedication, Skloot was able to earn the trust of a family who
had no reason to trust anyone, especially a white person interested in the medical
anomaly that their mother became to the world. She takes us into the volatile
heart of a shattered group of people, making us feel the pain they endured, the
bitter irony of Henrietta’s cell empire juxtaposed against their poverty and
ill health.
What made her different from the other journalists and
researchers who interviewed the Lacks family? She was not only bent on telling Henrietta’s full story, she was also
determined to be fair to them. She cared. She was swept into their struggles,
learning from them as they learned from her. And finally, the truth made healing possible. This should be required reading in
high school science classes.
