I read this at the recommendation of our friends Jen and Sue. They were having dinner with us, talking about the books we were reading, and Jen suggested I read this. I ordered it right there at the dinner table, on my Kindle, and finished it today.
I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a great read. It's an intriguing story, just not written in a particularly exciting way.
Henrietta Lacks was a poor African American living on a small, family tobacco farm in the 50s, when the family started migrating to find work in the steel mills around Baltimore. It was there that she was diagnosed with Cervical Cancer, and during one examination doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital routinely removed tissue samples for analysis.
The practice at the time was not to get the patient's permission to remove a tissue sample. Normal cells last a couple days outside of the body, then die. But Henrietta's cells continued living and multiplying. Very quickly, doctors at Johns Hopkins realized that Henrietta Lack's cells (called HeLa, for medical shorthand), could be used as a consistent and renewable platform for testing drugs, and a multi-million dollar business was born from culturing, storing and selling HeLa cells.
The fact that Henrietta's family never benefited financially from this business is neither unlawful nor unique. So, while it's an interesting slice of medical history, it's hard become animated about the issue.
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