The Bottom Line: Henrietta Lacks' story is told in this interesting story about scientific research and how lives are affected. Some say Skloot inserts herself too much, but I really liked the book.

My work has a reading club. I usually don't read the books on time, but I still want to read them. I recently listened to (on CD) The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and really enjoyed it.

This is a set of 10 disks that make up a little over 12 hours of reading. There are two voices for the book and at the end is an interview with the author, which was a nice addition.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor African American tobacco farmer who was buried in an unmarked grave sixty years ago. But, her cells, taken without her knowledge or consent, became one of the most important tools in medical research then and still are being used. Those cells were known to science as HeLa, and were the first immortal human cells grown in culture. They have been bought and sold by the millions, even billions. Author, Rebecca Skloot, takes the reader on an amazing journey from the colored ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s when Henrietta was a patient to East Baltimore today, where Henrietta's family struggles.

I enjoy science and there is a plenty to learn about HeLa from this book. How they were acquired, what makes them never die, how they have been used to create drugs and see how cells react to different things like being in space or atomic bombs. We learn how they infected other cultures, costing millions of dollars in research and just have very important they have been to science.

However we learn about the human aspect. We learn that Henrietta's family was never informed that they would be taking the cells for research and that the family didn't find out for over two decades that they'd been taken. We learn about her five children, especially Deborah, her youngest daughter. There is tension, there is a sense of injustice. We learn that Henrietta's oldest daughter was in a home/hospital for the Negro Insane and we get more details about what Rebecca and Deborah find there. The story is very personal. There are many sad parts, parts that will make you angry, and parts that just don't make sense that they should happen that way. You won't agree with the actions of all the people, but you'll know about them and they are part of history.

Skloot does a lot of research over many, many years. We learn why she was so interested in this story. And the book raises many questions about whether it is ok to use peoples' tissues for research without consent. There are no laws about this, just guidelines. The book allows you to consider how race and financial means may have played into how Henrietta and her family were treated. Should the family have received money for the cells and their some sort of proceeds from their current sales. There is opportunity to wonder what life would have been like if Henrietta didn't die at 31 years old with 5 children. It is a very educational as well as thought provoking book. The last part talks about where the people in the book are now and what laws and lawsuits have happened since Henrietta's death.

This is a really interesting book. I let my seven year old son listen to a fair portion of it, so he could learn about it and we could talk about it. There are portions where there are cussing and some disturbing parts about what happened to some of the characters that are inappropriate for younger audiences, but I think bioethics is something that younger readers can grasp and try to come to terms with and this books presents a good true scenario to allow you to think about such things. I highly recommend it.