I really liked this book. It’s the story of how a sample of cervical cancer cells were taken from Henrietta, who was being treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and those cells turned out to be really good at reproducing where all other cells had failed before, so they were reproduced widely as human cells for researchers to use and are still around in massive quantities today even though she died in 1951.

But, more importantly, it’s the story of Henrietta herself and her family, and how they didn’t know anything about this. And about how her family are still mostly living a poor life despite there being a huge industry based around Henrietta’s HeLa cells.

The book is written in a very “meta” manner, with the author chronicling how she came to write the book and the difficulties she encountered in getting the Lacks family to agree to participate when they had been victims of some bad reporting and con-men before. I thought this approach worked. If the book had been written in a more detached manner it would have been a different story and probably not as emotionally engaging as this one was.

It’s a good absorbing read, it works as a science book but it’s heart is a human interest story that makes you think a lot about ethics.