The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

A person is composed of cells. Cells that grow, reproduce, thrive, and ultimately die. Yet these cells come together to form something altogether much more amazing: human beings. Human beings that grow, reproduce, thrive, and ultimately, die. Yet these human beings are not referred to as globs of cells smashed together; no, they have individual names that someone carefully chose. These names, which can be as simple as John or Mary, or extravagant as Anastasia or Gerald, transform this grouping of cells into a person. A person who should not be referred to as an “abstraction,” but rather, as Elie Wiesel eloquently puts it, “... a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measures of triumph.” There are those though, who were,

The Lacks family had reporters and researchers approach them before, but none of them treated them the way Skloot did. Skloot, who learned about HeLa cells in highschool, was interested in the history and background of Henrietta, rather than the scientific facts. Although she was repeatedly rejected by the now cautious and paranoid Lacks family, who, at first, only saw her as a greedy reporter coming to bring even more upheaval into the family’s lives, Skloot was finally able to build a relationship with the family, namely Deborah, and invested into their lives, all the while writing the novel that would finally bring Henrietta’s story to light. Skloot had a different approach than the scientific community and media because she didn’t see Henrietta as an abstraction, but as an “universe with its own secrets,” which she so willingly shared with the