By JERRY COYNE - WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
Added: Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:00:00 UTC

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/review-the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks/

Rebecca Skloot, a science writer, assistant professor of English at the University of Memphis, and author of the blog The Culture Dish, has written a terrific new book: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The reviews have been uniformly positive, and I’ve just swelled the chorus with my own review over at Barnes and Noble. An excerpt from what I wrote:

Henrietta Lacks lives a shadowy life as a footnote in biology textbooks. I first encountered her when taking a college course in cell biology: the cells used in a particular experiment, we learned, were “HeLa cells,” which, though human, can grow independently outside the body in specially created laboratory conditions. They were named for the woman, Helen Lane, from whom they were originally derived. And that was all; having explained this, my professor returned to discussing the experiment and its significance. Like a drowned corpse bobbing up from the dark depths of footnote-dom, Helen Lane had surfaced briefly, only to descend again into obscurity. I didn’t give her a second thought.

In contrast, science writer Rebecca Skloot also had a Helen Lane footnote moment in high school, but saw in that footnote the nucleus of a story about science and society. After ten years of HeLa sleuthing, Skloot’s hunch has paid off handsomely: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a modern classic of science writing.

Let me qualify that. This isn’t science writing in the sense of Stephen Jay Gould or Richard Dawkins: Skloot doesn’t spend a lot of time describing or extolling scientific discoveries. For her, the science is a bit player — though an important one — in a complex and fascinating drama about how medical research intersected the lives of a poor black family in America. Her mixture of science and biography is sui generis, and its themes profound: racism, ethics, and scientific illiteracy.

TAGGED: BOOKS, MEDICINE, REVIEWS