Winter Reading: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

As the snow enthusiastically covered Boston on Wednesday, I devoured The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. This book is not one I would normally have chosen to buy and read, but my graduate program just started a book club. One of my favorite things about book clubs is that I end up reading books that I would not have picked on my own. Sometimes this is good (like ‘Henrietta Lacks’) and sometimes this is bad (like ‘Julie & Julia’ -sorry SaraHS). But, as my mother used to say, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

Image taken from LibraryThing Catalog

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is one of those books that leaves a niggling sensation in your stomach after you turn the last page. It sticks in the corner of your brain and hours after reading it, while staring out the window at a snow-scaped paradise, you wonder about the story and the characters. It is as if they come alive in a world halfway between reality and history. They jump off of the pages and into your life, and it is only as you turn your gaze away from the snow that you remember that they belong in a story.

What has lingered in my mind goes beyond the provocative questions about medical ethics and racial injustices that this book so deftly raises. These questions certainly deserve more thought, but the ‘something else’ that lingers started with this quote (placed just before the prologue of the book):

“We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.” 

-Elie Wiesel from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code.

The infamous HeLa cells that were taken from Henrietta Lacks became her identity. Once her soul departed and her body was laid to rest, her name and her dreams, faded into oblivion. She became an abstraction, a person who had never quite lived. Her cells, tiny pieces of herself that she unknowingly left behind, were to assume an identity of their own. 

We too unwittingly leave pieces of ourselves behind every day, like a trail of breadcrumbs that follows our footsteps. What becomes of the pieces that we leave strewn behind us? A lost glove in the supermarket, a digital footprint in cyberspace, cells in a doctor’s office. 

As we turn our gaze to the world around us, to strangers passing us on the street, we begin to see them as pieces. They become another tired face on a busy commute; a dropped coffee cup, now half-covered in ice. 

Perhaps we do not have enough room in our minds and hearts to see the universe that resides within every person. But, it would behoove us to reflect, now and again, on the pieces we leave behind us. For, if we see others as pieces, how must they see us?

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Reading is a joy, a delectable pleasure. Not only do books, fiction and non-fiction alike, create new worlds for us to explore, but, at times, they cause us to rub our eyes and view our own world differently. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has assumed its place on the bookshelf, to be re-read at a later date, and I am already opening the pages of another.