Town Hall Tonight: Author Rebecca Skloot On The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Tonight at Town Hall, science writer Rebecca Skloot will be on hand discussing her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Part biography, part family drama and part science tract, Immortal Life is a great read about a woman whose importance to modern science is difficult to overstate. Henrietta Lacks never won a Nobel Prize or donned a lab coat. Indeed, she never even knew about the world of new scientific possibilities that she would become a part of.
In 1951, Henrietta Lacks developed a particularly aggressive case of cervical cancer, which would kill her in a matter of months. But before her death, doctors at Johns Hopkins University, where Lacks was being treated, removed cells from her body for research purposes, not bothering to inform or get consent from Lacks or her family.
As cells preserved in laboratory settings tend to die off after just a few divisions, this should have been the end of Lacks story - instead, it was only the beginning. Researchers found that Lacks cells did something unprecedented in the lab - the stayed alive. If cared for properly, the cells would just keep dividing, providing scientists with a never-ending supply of human cells to experiment on and representing a great leap forward in medical science. Cells from Henrietta Lacks were cultivated for medical experimentation, and became known as the HeLa line of cells. The cells were instrumental in the development of a polio vaccine, became the first cellular line to go into mass production for commercial purposes, and are still in use to this day by doctors and researchers around the world, studying everything from treatments for AIDS and cancer to cloning technology. Since her death, scientists have produced over 50 million metric tons of HeLa for experimentation.
But rather than narrow her vision to this fascinating tale of experimentation, Skloot explores the effect that the existence on the HeLa line has had on Lacks' surviving family, telling in intimate detail the story of a group of children who learned after decades that in a very real way, their mother was still alive and having medical experiments conducted on her. Which, naturally, is where things get weird.
You can see Rebecca Skloot discuss her new book and the life of Henrietta Lacks on The Colbert Report here, but it’s not going to be the same as seeing her discuss the book in person tonight at Town Hall.
Rebecca Skloot// Seattle Town Hall// 7:30 pm // $5 - Tickets
