Rebecca Skloot Tells the Story of a Woman Whose Cells Changed Medicine:

I was happy to do a radio interview with author Rebecca Skloot (listen here), as we discussed her best-selling book which tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, who died broke, but whose cells make billions of dollars. Below is an excerpt from the book, titled: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It's a fascinating story and a book everyone should own.

Rebecca has appeared on numerous media outlets to discuss this amazing story including ABC News with Diane Sawyer. Henrietta Lacks was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same  land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells -- taken without her  knowledge -- became one of the most important tools in medicine.

The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, her cells -- known as  "HeLa cells" -- are still alive today, though she has been dead for  more than 60 years.

If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh  more than 50 million metric tons -- as much as a hundred Empire State  Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine;  uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb;  helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning,  and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked  grave. And though her cells launched a multimillion-dollar selling human  biological materials, her family -- who often can't even afford health  insurance -- never saw any of the profits.

In her new book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," author Rebecca  Skloot tells the story of Henrietta, her amazing cells, and the family  she left behind.  Below, an excerpt from the book.

PROLOGUE

The Woman in the Photograph

There's a photo on my wall of a woman I've never met, its left corner  torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera  and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep  red. It's the late 1940s and she hasn't yet reached the age of thirty.  Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful,  oblivious to the tumor growing inside her -- a tumor that would leave  her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath  the photo, a caption says her name is "Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or  Helen Larson."

No one knows who took that picture, but it's appeared hundreds of times  in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She's  usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all.  She's simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world's first  immortal human cells -- her cells, cut from her cervix just months  before she died.

Her real name is Henrietta Lacks.

I've spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she  led, what happened to her children, and what she'd think about cells  from her cervix living on forever -- bought, sold, packaged, and shipped  by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I've tried to  imagine how she'd feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space  missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or  that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine:  the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro  fertilization. I'm pretty sure that she -- like most of us -- would be  shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in  laboratories now than there ever were in her body.

There's no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta's cells are  alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa  cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric  tons -- an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs  almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all  HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they'd wrap around the Earth at least  three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. In her prime,  Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall.

I first learned about HeLa cells and the woman behind them in 1988,  thirty-seven years after her death, when I was sixteen and sitting in a  community college biology class. My instructor, Donald Defler, a gnomish  balding man, paced at the front of the lecture hall and flipped on an  overhead projector. He pointed to two diagrams that appeared on the wall  behind him. They were schematics of the cell reproduction cycle, but to  me they just looked like a neon-colored mess of arrows, squares, and  circles with words I didn't understand, like "MPF Triggering a Chain  Reaction of Protein Activations." BLOG COMMENTS POWERED BY DISQUS