ROCHELLE RILEY  / DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Meet the author today

Author Rebecca Skloot will discuss "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" at 2 p.m. today
at the Detroit Public Library, 5201 Woodward. Her appearance is part of the library's One Book,
One Community program, which encourages people to read a book and talk about it with the author.

It is a story so unbelievable that it has to be true.

In 1951, 31-year-old Henrietta Lacks walked into Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital
with a fast-growing cervical cancer that would kill her before year's end.

As was routine at the hospital, doctors took samples of Lack's cervical cells -- without her permission,
without her knowledge.

Forty-nine years later, author Rebecca Skloot called Henrietta Lacks' daughter, Deborah,
to tell her she was writing a book about those cells, which had been grown and split and
regrown billions of times.

They also had been used to help prove that the vaccine against polio was effective.
They had been used in thousands of medical experiments.
Her "immortal cells" became very popular because not all cells live and
grow to help researchers study diseases and advance medicine.

But for decades, Lacks' immortal cells also have earned billions of dollars
for biotech and pharmaceutical companies. Moreover, the initial factory
to grow Henrietta Lacks' cells was built at Tuskegee Institute, which earned
hundreds of thousands of dollars from the growing process to spend to train young black scientists.

Lacks family left out

Henrietta Lacks and her descendants never got a dime. While her cells were making millions,
her family couldn't even afford health insurance.

Rebecca Skloot tells this story in the popular 2010 science biography
"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," which she will discuss in a 2 p.m. program today
at the Detroit Public Library.

In an interview, Skloot said her book tour is as much about encouraging science education
as it is about Henrietta Lacks.

"I think science writing is incredibly important ...," she said. "Science is such an important part of life,
and there's such a problem with scientific illiteracy in this country. There are people who
don't have access to even the most basic science education. It has real consequences. ...
It has to do with our school system and class and race."

Asked whether the Lacks case was the greatest theft in medical history, Skloot said,
"There are people who think that's the case." But she added that "it was standard practice
for people to take cells without permission."

"My intention in writing the book was to tell all sides of the story, to tell the story
of the human beings in the labs and the human beings inside the scientists."

She said there were points in the story -- and in the history -- where questionable ethical decisions
were made, such as when doctors went back to the Lacks family to get more blood
under the pretense of determining whether they were susceptible to the cancer that killed Lacks --
and when the hospital released Lacks' medical records to the media.

Medical legacy

But the greater story is how a woman who grew up picking tobacco in hot fields and
who barely scraped by gave the world something that changed medical science and research,
indeed changed the world -- immortal cells.

Skloot now is working on a middle-school edition of the book and a screenplay for a movie
that will be coproduced by Oprah Winfrey. She also is running the Henrietta Lacks Foundation,
which she established to pay for tuition and books for Lacks' children and grandchildren.

Lacks' children, who sued for compensation for their mother's cells, have yet to receive anything.

"But they certainly are still waiting for something else, for biotech companies,
pharmaceutical companies, to come forward," Skloot said. "I've talked to a few
about donating to the foundation. The concern is they would be setting a precedent.
If they pay the Lacks family for their sales, then what about other people's cells?
With Johns Hopkins, it would look like an admission of guilt."

Indeed.

Contact ROCHELLE RILEY: rriley99@freepress.com