Here, though, I’m going to return to the issue of writing non-fiction like fiction. She is, to put it mildly, horrified – and rushes to tell her husband and thence the family. “ What supplier? Who’s got cells from my mother-in-law?” “What do you mean, ‘everybody else’?!” Bobbette snapped. “I ordered them from a supplier just like everybody else.” He held his hands up, like Whoa, wait a minute. “What you mean you got her cells in your lab?” “What?!” Bobbette yelled, jumping up from her chair. Until that point, no-one in the family had known that Henrietta’s cells were still “alive” and being used in research all over the world: In the third part, the two tracks coalesce into one chronological thread, starting from 1973 when the late Henrietta’s daughter-in-law, Bobbette, discovers quite accidentally via a friend’s brother-in-law, that Henrietta’s cells were being used in scientific research and had been since 1951. In the first two parts, the story is told in two roughly alternating, chronological threads – one telling the story of Henrietta Lacks, her cells, and her family, from 1920 to 1973 the other tracking the early days of Skloot’s research from 1999 to 2000. The book is divided into three parts – Life, Death, Immortality. Their story is bound up in a long invidious history of research carried out on African-Americans, which is also detailed in the book. A major issue which Skloot had to confront was the understandable suspicion and anger of the Lacks’ family, whose help she needed if she were to tell this story properly and with integrity. (These two chapters make great reading in themselves.) It took around 10 years to write, not just because of this extensive research. It’s not surprising then that this book has been extensively researched – as evidenced by the Notes and Acknowledgements. Skloot explains her own fascination with Henrietta, from being introduced to her cells in high school, through those HeLa cells being “omnipresent” throughout her biology degree, to when she was in graduate school studying writing “and became fixated on the idea of someday telling Henrietta’s story”. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the story of the cells, so if you want to know about them – read the book and/or watch this video. Earlier stories include Michael Rogers’ 1976 article in Rolling Stone, and the 1997 BBC documentary, The way of all flesh, which you can watch on YouTube. Skloot wasn’t the first so tell it, however – something she makes clear during our journey. If you haven’t guessed it by now, then, this book is another example of those non-fiction books that I like so much in which authors author takes us on their journey of discovery, in this case to understand the people and the science, the ethics and the law, behind this astonishing story. It’s not only the story of HeLa cells and Henrietta Lacks, but of Henrietta’s family-particularly Deborah-and their lifelong struggle to make peace with the existence of those cells, and the science that made them possible. The Lackses challenged everything I thought I knew about faith, science, journalism, and race. It also interrogates the complex intersection between race, class and ethics in medical research as well as broader ethical ramifications of issues like “informed consent” and the commercialisation of human tissue. Skloot, herself, says early in the book, I’ve described the book as hybrid, because the story (or biography) of Henrietta Lacks is just one of its threads. In addition, the paperback edition was on the New York Times Bestseller List for 75 weeks. It won multiple awards, including, says Wikipedia, the National Academies Communication Award for “best creative work that helps the public understanding of topics in science, engineering or medicine”. As Skloot writes, “these cells have transformed modern medicine.” The book was published in the USA in 2010. Many of you will have heard of the book, or, if not, of Henrietta Lacks, or of her HeLa cells? It’s a sort of hybrid biography-cum-science book about an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks who died in 1951, and the immortal HeLa cell line that was and continues to be cultured from her cervical cancer cells. In her extensive acknowledgements at the end of her book, The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot thanks “Heather at The Book Store, who tracked down every good novel she could find with a disjointed structure, all of which I devoured while trying to figure out the structure of this book.” Interesting that she looked at novels, particularly given our recent discussion regarding non-fiction that reads like fiction, but more on that later …
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