The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in Pick-a-Shelf

Sep 27, 2013 Rebekah rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: genre-history, genre-non-fiction, genre-biography, genre-book-club, grad-school, hard-copy, genre-science, genre-health-medicine, genre-medical, setting-us-maryland

This book was required reading for a seminar that I attend on leadership in education in neurodevelopmental disorders.

- I felt woefully uneducated because I have never heard of the HeLa cells, & I have taken several university science courses. I even took a Human Biology course that covered bioethics pretty extensively.

- The book is fairly interesting from a science/historical standpoint. I did not realize that informed consent was not required in medical treatment until pretty late, the 1970s This book was required reading for a seminar that I attend on leadership in education in neurodevelopmental disorders.

- I felt woefully uneducated because I have never heard of the HeLa cells, & I have taken several university science courses. I even took a Human Biology course that covered bioethics pretty extensively.

- The book is fairly interesting from a science/historical standpoint. I did not realize that informed consent was not required in medical treatment until pretty late, the 1970s or so! Now, informed consent, IRB's, and HIPAA make up such a large part of what scientists, medical staff, and researchers do, that it was hard to imagine a world without those protections in place.

- It was disturbing at the very end when I found out that certain genes are patented by pharmaceutical companies, basically allowing companies to profit off of needed medical tests and treatment and stopping all other educational researchers from doing independent research on the genes. Such as the test for the very virulent & heritable strands of breast cancer! I do think the capitalization of medical research is unethical and a big problem for the future of medicine. I wish the book had covered this angle more, rather than the "tissue/cell" angle. I don't think I care if a hospital uses my discarded tissues or cells for research, but it would be nice if there was a uniform procedure regarding informed consent, so that people knew that was what was happening when they undergo a procedure. I also don't think cells are "live" or part of a person's "souls," and I am very much in favor or stem-cell research.

- This book was way too long and some parts definitely dragged.

- The best "human interest" part of the story, in my opinion, was Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, trying to find out the story of her mother.

- I HATED the disjointed structure and it bored me to tears at times. Just tell the story and get on with it. Jumping all over place and time and characters is just annoying.

- There is way too much of the author in this nonfiction book. She should have cut herself out completely. She is boring. She is exploitative. It came across as too "oooh englightened white girl finally got the scary black family to trust her" Get over yourself! This irritated me throughout the novel. "Ohhhh it is soooo hard sitting in a fancy hotel room waiting for these people to return my phone calls." If you want to write an autobiography about your time researching/writing the life of Henrietta Lacks, then do that, but don't write a book about Henrietta Lacks that has more Rebecca in it than Henrietta!

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Aug 20, 2010 Nicole rated it liked it

Shelves: audio-book, non-fiction, 2010

True-story about medical developments from a cell sample taken unknowingly from a black woman in the 50s her story. It mixed both the science and medical developments with the lives of Henrietta Lacks and her family. It moved pretty well for a non fiction book, though tended to slow down for me when it got going on the science side.
It was an interesting look at how both scientists and the courts completely separate their studies from the people they are being performed on, and a bit scary in th ...more

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Feb 09, 2010 Joanna rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks, 2011-read, nonfiction, microhistory, rws-2011-spring

The reader for the unabridged audiobook did an excellent job. She performed the different characters with sufficiently differentiated voices without overdoing the accents/dialects. I read this book immediately after reading In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences and the contrast is interesting. Capote completely leaves himself out of the story (even though he necessarily developed relationships with the folks he interviewed) and never mentions his own feelings. S ...more

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Oct 31, 2012 Cora rated it really liked it

Shelves: kindle, nonfiction, maryland, ethics, baltimore, biology, pbt-100-nonfiction, medicine, bioethics

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks follows the mission of Rebecca Skloot to find out more about the woman whose cells were taken and turned into the first immortal human cell line, HeLa. I found a lot of the ethical dilemmas raised in the book to be fascinating. I also found it interesting to learn so much about the history of medical research. While the story of Henrietta's daughter's search for answers about her mother, the cells, and her sister did shed some light on how the decisions of ot ...more

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