The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

I picked up this book hoping it would tell me more about the HeLa cells and the background to them. It sort of does that, except it's really more a book about how the author gathered the information in the book - "I went here, met X, went somewhere else, met Y". As a result, it ends up feeling like the author has inserted herself into the story, and perhaps also got a bit too close to the participants.

For me, this is one of those books which isn't that fulfilling on its own, but a good jumping off point by following up the references etc.

This is a really great book to listen to. It was narrated well.

The content was great - a very neat combination of personal stories and the very important history of medical science in the US and the racism of it. I highly recommend this book!

Will post my thoughts on Hive soon

this book was a great combination of story and science; i was one-third into it on the first day of reading and still didn't want to put it down.

the author heads each chapter with a timeline which makes the jumps between timeframes easy to follow and lets her see through one 'arm' of the story (of which there are many!). this must be one of the hardest things to balance: how to weave scientific discovery - which is incremental and is often attributed to many different scientists - into a story that encompasses not one, but 2 women's lives.

what results is a remarkable piece of non-fiction that couches the details of cancer research, gene mapping, the development of the polio vaccine, tissue culture and it's legal implications into a memoir.

Henrietta was a poor black woman living outside Baltimore at the time she discovered she had terminal cancer in 1951. When one of her doctors was able to keep her cancer cells (now known as HeLa cells) alive and growing indefinitely in the laboratory, it was one of the most important discoveries of modern oncology. But who was this woman who had unknowingly contributed so much to science at the moment of her death? Skloot expertly uncovers the mystery of the face behind the cells.