Friday, February 18, 2011

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

I came across this book as I was looking for a good medical book to read in the library. It was so interesting reading about how research has developed through time. Henrietta Lacks was a black woman who was hospitalized in the 1950s from cervical cancer. The doctors ended up taking some of the cancerous cells to study them and see if they could grow them in culture without having them die off. Her cells grew at an incredibly rapid pace and are still alive today even though Henrietta has been dead for more than 60 years. Her cells are known as HeLa; the first two letters from her first and last name. If you piled all the HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons. Her cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine, developing drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson's disease, and they've been used to research numerous other things. 
In the book you get medical background along with Henrietta's life and the world that her children had to grow up into. Her children didn't find out about their mothers cells still living until a good 20 years after she died. It was a really interesting to read even but I'm still unsure on how I feel about it. It makes me wonder how many other stories are out there like this. 

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