books

It takes a particular kind of book to make a reader chase family members around the house just to read passages aloud, and Rebecca Skloot's decade-long investigation into the woman behind HeLa is that kind of book. The bare facts have been circulating in biology classrooms for seventy years: in 1951, a thirty-one-year-old Black tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins, and cells taken from her tumour without her knowledge became the first human cell line to survive and multiply indefinitely in a lab. Those cells have since underwritten the polio vaccine, IVF, gene mapping, and a multibillion-dollar tissue industry. Henrietta herself was buried in an unmarked grave, and her family learned of her "immortality" only in the mid-1970s, when researchers began drawing blood from her children without explaining why.

What Skloot does with this material is harder than it looks. She braids three separate books together - a biography of Henrietta, a history of twentieth-century cell science, and an intimate portrait of the surviving Lacks children - and the seams mostly hold. The science is pitched for readers who failed high school biology but respects them enough not to dumb anything down. The history of medical experimentation on Black Americans, from the Tuskegee syphilis study to the patients at Crownsville, is laid out without melodrama and lands with real force. And the family, particularly Henrietta's daughter Deborah, emerges as fully realised people rather than symbols. Deborah's terror that her mother's cells might be suffering somewhere, her hunger for any scrap of information about a woman she barely remembered, her sudden shifts between trust and suspicion - these are rendered with a novelist's attention.

The book is not without its real weaknesses. Skloot makes herself a character in the narrative, and some readers will find her presence clarifying and others will find it a distraction. The middle stretches occasionally lose focus as the cast expands to include scientists, extended relatives, a neighbourhood grocer, and various hangers-on, and the chronology can feel disordered when Skloot's journalistic detours take precedence over the story she is ostensibly telling. There are fair questions, too, about how a white author represents working-class Black voices, and about whether her affectionate involvement with the family compromises her distance from the material. These are not fatal objections but they are worth raising.

Still, what the book gets right is substantial. It refuses to treat informed consent as a settled question, pushing into genuinely uncomfortable territory about who owns the tissue once it leaves the body, who profits, and who gets told. It recovers a person from a footnote. It treats the Lacks family's religious framework around immortality with the same seriousness it brings to the scientific one, which is rarer than it should be in popular science writing. The prose is unadorned and moves quickly, and the structural ambition pays off more often than it falters.

Fifteen years on, it remains the book to read on HeLa, and probably the best single introduction to the ethics of tissue research written for a general audience.