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Jun. 10th, 2010 12:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsA while back, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cerusee recommended me The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
It's a fascinating book, and definitely one that's worth reading. Odds are that Henrietta Lacks has impacted your life - she's the woman whose cervical cancer provided the HeLa line of cells that was the first "immortal" cell line to survive indefinitely in lab, leading to like a million exciting medical discoveries (polio vaccines! AIDS research!) that are too many to list here. The medical research had somewhat less of an impact on her descendents' lives for a while, seeing as nobody really bothered to tell them about it until the 1970's and most of them don't have health insurance. Understandably, the family is not super-thrilled about this, or the fact that an enormous (and profitable) medical industry has essentially grown up around their mother's cells, which were taken without consent - and the dynamic is complicated further by the long history of racism in medicine and (white) doctors using black patients as research subjects without getting informed consent.
Rebecca Skloot's intention in writing the book is pretty much to rehumanize Henrietta Lacks and bring her story, and her family's story, to the forefront, along with the more clinical story of the HeLa cell line related in medical textbooks. As a part of this process, she basically camped outside the doors of the Lacks descendents for a year asking to interview them for the book. The family, which had been dramatically burned by stressful HeLa-related attention before, refused. Eventually she convinced Henrietta's daughter Deborah that the book was a worthwhile endeavor - though some of the other Lacks family members had more mixed feelings - on the condition that a portion of the proceeds go to a scholarship and healthcare foundation for the Lacks descendents, and Deborah became heavily involved in the process of researching the book.
All this is a part of the Lacks story. The one thing that I'm somewhat ambivalent about - and I honestly don't know if it was avoidable or not - is that, as a result, Rebecca Skloot herself, and her research process and involvement with the family, also become a major part of the book. In a way, this is a good thing; I mean, authors are people with biases, and it's pretty disingenuous to hide behind a mask of impartiality. On the other hand, I found myself agreeing a little bit with this review, that occasionally the first-person narrative verges a little too much on making the author the heroine of the story. And the author isn't the heroine; the book is (and should be, and has to be) about Henrietta Lacks, and her family, and HeLa, but not about Rebecca Skloot. But then you get back to the problem of nonexistent impartiality - I wouldn't want to remove the presence of the author from the book either. So . . . I don't know.
Either way, though, it's absolutely a worthwhile book for just about anyone to read.
cerusee recommended me The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.It's a fascinating book, and definitely one that's worth reading. Odds are that Henrietta Lacks has impacted your life - she's the woman whose cervical cancer provided the HeLa line of cells that was the first "immortal" cell line to survive indefinitely in lab, leading to like a million exciting medical discoveries (polio vaccines! AIDS research!) that are too many to list here. The medical research had somewhat less of an impact on her descendents' lives for a while, seeing as nobody really bothered to tell them about it until the 1970's and most of them don't have health insurance. Understandably, the family is not super-thrilled about this, or the fact that an enormous (and profitable) medical industry has essentially grown up around their mother's cells, which were taken without consent - and the dynamic is complicated further by the long history of racism in medicine and (white) doctors using black patients as research subjects without getting informed consent.
Rebecca Skloot's intention in writing the book is pretty much to rehumanize Henrietta Lacks and bring her story, and her family's story, to the forefront, along with the more clinical story of the HeLa cell line related in medical textbooks. As a part of this process, she basically camped outside the doors of the Lacks descendents for a year asking to interview them for the book. The family, which had been dramatically burned by stressful HeLa-related attention before, refused. Eventually she convinced Henrietta's daughter Deborah that the book was a worthwhile endeavor - though some of the other Lacks family members had more mixed feelings - on the condition that a portion of the proceeds go to a scholarship and healthcare foundation for the Lacks descendents, and Deborah became heavily involved in the process of researching the book.
All this is a part of the Lacks story. The one thing that I'm somewhat ambivalent about - and I honestly don't know if it was avoidable or not - is that, as a result, Rebecca Skloot herself, and her research process and involvement with the family, also become a major part of the book. In a way, this is a good thing; I mean, authors are people with biases, and it's pretty disingenuous to hide behind a mask of impartiality. On the other hand, I found myself agreeing a little bit with this review, that occasionally the first-person narrative verges a little too much on making the author the heroine of the story. And the author isn't the heroine; the book is (and should be, and has to be) about Henrietta Lacks, and her family, and HeLa, but not about Rebecca Skloot. But then you get back to the problem of nonexistent impartiality - I wouldn't want to remove the presence of the author from the book either. So . . . I don't know.
Either way, though, it's absolutely a worthwhile book for just about anyone to read.
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Date: 2010-06-10 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-10 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-10 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-10 04:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-10 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-10 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 03:26 am (UTC)Yeah, I think it's a difficult balance to pull off, one way or another. I do appreciate that she is very clearly trying to be very honest and transparent, in all directions, or at least is presenting herself that way.
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Date: 2010-06-10 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 03:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 07:25 am (UTC)I actually couldn't put it down at times. We're passing my copy around work after we read a review in some magazine and all decided we wanted to read it.... We have a collective literary consciousness at my costume shop...
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Date: 2010-06-11 03:19 pm (UTC)Costume shops are awesome places for this! Because costumers are often awesome people. *serene*