Finished: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Skloot) A fascinating book about the cancerous cells, known as HeLa cells, that were taken from a woman with cervical cancer in 1951, which were the only cells to ever continue living and multiplying outside the body for a long period of time. They were so prolific that they were used in all kinds of scientific research, their first important use being their ability to grown the polio virus, which led directly to Jonas Salk developing the vaccine for polio. The cells have been used for cancer research, AIDS research, HPV research, gene mapping, and on and on. Here's a snippet from an article that says it better than I can:

The HeLa cell line was derived for use in cancer research. These cells proliferate abnormally rapidly, even compared to other cancer cells. Like many other cancer cells, HeLa cells have an active version of telomerase during cell division, which prevents the incremental shortening of telomeres that is implicated in aging and eventual cell death. In this way the cells circumvent the Hayflick Limit, which is the limited number of cell divisions that most normal cells can later undergo before becoming senescent.

HeLa cells are still used today in labs all over the world. The story was all about the author of the book first hearing about Henrietta Lacks and wanting to write her story. As it turns out, Henrietta Lacks was a very poor black woman in the Baltimore area in 1951. She had five children and was diagnosed at the age of 30 with cervical cancer. She underwent radiation treatment at Johns Hopkins, but her cancer was so virulent that nothing could stop it. She died at the age of 31 leaving behind young children who barely remembered her. Her doctor unknowingly and without her permission, took a sample of her cancerous cervical cells and kept them for research. The researcher, George Gey, who figured out how to culture them to keep them alive and multiplying was so thrilled to have kept cells alive outside the body, that he shipped samples of HeLa cells for free to anyone who asked. He named them HeLa using the standard lab abbreviation of the first two letters of the donor's first and last names. Eventually labs and companies started making money somewhere along the line, but nothing ever went to Henrietta's poor family. As a matter of fact...they couldn't even afford health insurance. It wasn't until about 20 years after her death that her real name was leaked and and doctors contacted her family so they could come and get some of their blood samples for comparison. Her HeLa cells had helped so many people, but not the people closest to her. Still...there was no formal recognition for Henrietta or her family. The book tells the author's story as she get so know Henrietta's family and piece together her life story and whether or not the family is ever validated at the least. There's also a whole underlying tone about how black people were treated so differently in the 1950's in the medical community. Even at Johns Hopkins, which was specifically established by the man who donated the land and money with the tenet that there be equal treatment of the poor, black community, had separate areas where black people were treated. Chillingly, the book also references the Tuskegee syphilis experiment that went on from 1932 to 1972. Black men with syphilis were taken to the hospital and their medical and food costs covered as doctors watched how syphilis progressed in untreated individuals! Even knowing how much pain they would eventually suffer, they were not given treatment. And the worst...even when penicillin was discovered to be the treatment for syphilis in 1940, the men were knowingly NOT treated with penicillin by the doctors so they could continue their experiment. Unbelievable for me to think this was going on in my young lifetime. :-( So glad I read this book and got to know a little bit about the woman who could be instrumental in Earl surviving brain cancer!!