The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot (2010)
“A Black woman's cells were taken without her knowledge and became the most important biological material in medical history — and her family never received a dime.”
Essay Questions & Food for Thought
30questions designed to challenge assumptions and provoke original thinking. These can't be answered from a summary — you need the actual text.
Skloot structures the book in three interweaving narrative strands: Henrietta's life, the Lacks family's story, and the scientific history of HeLa. Why this structure? What would be lost if the book told these stories sequentially rather than simultaneously?
Henrietta never speaks in the book — all her words are reconstructed or reported by others. How does Skloot navigate the ethical problem of giving voice to someone who cannot consent to being represented?
The doctors who took Henrietta's cells in 1951 were not breaking any law. Does legality determine morality? Use the book to construct an argument.
Deborah believes HeLa cells are literally her mother's soul, still alive. Skloot does not correct this belief. Is this journalistic integrity or a failure to tell Deborah the scientific truth?
The California Supreme Court ruled in Moore v. Regents that patients have no property rights in excised tissue. Make the strongest possible argument FOR this ruling, then make the strongest possible argument AGAINST it.
Skloot describes the scientific language used about HeLa cells — passive voice, de-identified specimens, 'biological material.' How does this language shape what scientists see and don't see about the ethics of their work?
How would this story be different if Henrietta Lacks had been white? Use specific details from the book to support your answer.
Skloot established the Henrietta Lacks Foundation with proceeds from the book. Is this an adequate response to the ethical problem of a white journalist profiting from a Black family's story? What would adequacy even look like?
The HeLa contamination crisis of the 1960s and 1970s — when Henrietta's cells crowded out other cultures — is presented as both scientific crisis and dark comedy. What does it mean that the cells of an ignored Black woman infiltrated and disrupted the entire global research infrastructure?
Henrietta's daughter Elsie was institutionalized at the 'Hospital for the Negro Insane' and may have been subjected to experimental procedures. How does Elsie's story change the scope of the book's argument?
George Gey shared HeLa cells freely, without commercial motive. Later researchers and companies commercialized them. At what point — if any — did the ethical violation occur?
Skloot writes that 'every person who has had a blood draw may be a Henrietta Lacks.' Do you believe this? What would you want to know about how your biological samples are used?
The book was published in 2010. The HeLa genome was published without family consent in 2013 — after the book. Does this subsequent event validate or complicate Skloot's argument?
HeLa cells contributed to the HPV vaccine — which targets the exact strain of HPV that caused Henrietta's cancer. Is this poetic justice, or does it deepen the tragedy?
Compare Henrietta Lacks's erasure from the history of HeLa cells to the erasure of Black scientists and inventors from American history generally. What structural conditions produce this pattern of erasure?
Deborah's relationship with Skloot is complex: she is simultaneously Skloot's source, her collaborator, and someone Skloot has power over. How does Skloot manage this power imbalance — and does she manage it well?
The book raises the question of whether patients should share in the commercial profits generated from research using their tissue. Make a policy proposal that addresses this — what would fair compensation look like in practice?
Skloot's prose shifts registers when writing about different subjects: clinical for science, warm for family, personal for her relationship with Deborah. Find one example of each register and explain how the style serves the content.
The Lacks family's deep suspicion of medicine — rooted in Tuskegee, in their own experiences, in the family's history with Hopkins — is presented as rational rather than irrational. How does the book ask you to think about distrust of institutions as a form of knowledge?
The Johns Hopkins Hospital that treated Henrietta in 1951 and the Johns Hopkins that eventually acknowledged her contribution are the same institution separated by decades of legal and cultural change. Does institutional acknowledgment — without compensation — constitute justice?
Skloot spent ten years on this book and had to learn cell biology to write it. How does the visible labor of the reporting affect your trust in the author — and your reading of the book's ethical arguments?
HeLa cells have been described as 'immortal.' Henrietta Lacks died at thirty-one and was buried in an unmarked grave. What does the book ask you to feel about the word 'immortal' by the time you finish it?
The book ends with Davon looking at HeLa cells through a microscope and not speaking for a long time. Why does Skloot end there, and what does the silence mean?
Compare The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks to Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life. Both concern the systematic denial of bodily autonomy to Black Americans in different eras. What has changed? What hasn't?
Skloot notes that the HeLa production facility was established at Tuskegee University — historically Black, the same institution associated with the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Is this coincidence significant? What does it reveal about how American medicine positioned Black institutions?
If Henrietta Lacks had survived her cancer and lived to see HeLa cells become famous — what would justice have looked like? What could medicine have offered her?
Skloot acknowledges that she profited from this story. Does her acknowledgment of this problem resolve it, or does the ethical problem persist regardless of her self-awareness?
The book was widely adopted as a college Common Read. What does it mean for a book about racial exploitation and non-consent to become required reading at predominantly white universities?
Every chapter of the book braids at least two of its three narrative threads. Choose one chapter and identify the exact moment where the braid 'tightens' — where the science, the family, and the ethics converge most powerfully. Explain how Skloot achieves this effect.
The book's title calls Henrietta Lacks 'immortal.' After reading, do you think the title is a celebration, an irony, or an indictment — or all three?