Reddit reviews The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

http://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052173

I've helped contribute to that weight. Also, more than 2 tons of cells have been produced and her family hasn't seen a dime.

Have you read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks? I quite enjoyed it.

Immortal cells already exist, i.e. HeLa cells.

> One biologist, Leigh Van Valen, has written that Lacks' cancer cells have evolved into a self-replicating, single-cell life-form and has proposed HeLa cells be given the new species name of Helacyton gartleri. The cells are a genetic chimera of human papillomavirus 18 (HPV18) and human cervical cells and now have a distinct, stable, non-human chromosome number. His 1991 suggestion has not been followed, nor, indeed, been widely noted. With near unanimity, evolutionary scientists and biologists hold that a chimeric human cell line is not a distinct species, and that tumorigenesis is not an evolutionary process.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot

Yeah, it's much bigger than circumcision:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052173

http://www.amazon.ca/The-Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052173

Great book about her life. Emphatic recommendation.

It's really hard for me to pick an all-time favorite but the two best non-fiction books I read in 2010 were The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Big Girls Don't Cry .

Not sure if this is totally relevant, but I just found it and am looking forward to reading it:

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks:

From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive--even thrive--in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta's family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution--and her cells' strange survival--left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories?

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks?
http://www.amazon.ca/Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1400052173