The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

As I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I could not help but think about the immense amount of research that had to have gone into the piece. Rebecca Skloot devoted over ten years of her life to create this book and make Henrietta and her family’s story available to the world. After finishing the book, I read the acknowledgements and the notes Skloot provided. She contacted hundreds of people for interviews, dug up mountains of information, and kept years of notes, tape-recorded interviews, and artifacts to put all of the pieces of HeLa back together.

The heavy medical information struck me the most in the reading. For me, someone who has only a basic understanding of cells and other medical topics, I usually have to read and re-read anything that deals with any medical jargon (I can only imagine how the Lacks family felt trying to understand those things as well). On page 28, Skloot begins to describe various types of cervical carcinomas writing, “Cervical carcinomas are divided into two types: invasive carcinomas, which have penetrated the surface of the cervix, and noninvasive carcinomas, which haven’t. The noninvasive type is sometimes called “sugar-icing carcinoma,” because it grows in a smooth layered sheet across the surface of the cervix…” I found Skloot’s descriptions of Henrietta’s procedures, other doctor’s experimentation, among many other medical topics easy to understand. I think Skloot’s background in Biology afforded her the ability to easily convey these ideas to readers. Medical journals and doctors sometimes get caught up in the heavy medical terms which I think make it difficult for people to understand especially when they are not familiar with those topics. I believe that was something Skloot did effectively while compiling her research into the text.

I like to think that writer’s are detectives but in a different context than solving a crime. Skloot shows this detective work when she was in Baltimore having difficulty reaching the Lackses; that was when she realized she was seeing the same view Michael Rogers described in his article in Rolling Stone, and she began to call numbers in the phone book of everyone named Lacks. That led her to Tuner’s Station and got the ball rolling on her adventure. Skloot got up and got out, looking for any and all information that could lead her to the Lacks family and closer to finding out about Henrietta’s life. She immersed herself into the Lacks family, becoming a family member herself as she developed a strong relationship to Deborah. I think that those parts of the research are the most important to creating a successful story. The story was essentially there for Skloot, but she had to uncover a vast amount of information to find it. This teaches me a lot about myself as a writer. I need to be more assertive and not be afraid to ask questions when I’m creating a story because I never know where it could lead me.

Also, Skloot used multiple resources to find stories for one sliver of the story. Since George Gey had passed many years before Skloot began her research, she had to work around that. She talked to his lab assistants and his co-workers. She pieced together him as a character in the story even though he wasn’t around to help create it himself. That is another very valuable form of researching; if the story isn’t available one way, you have to go a different route to find it.