Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells&mdash;taken without her knowledge&mdash;became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first &ldquo;immortal&rdquo; human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they&rsquo;d weigh more than 50 million metric tons&mdash;as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb&rsquo;s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. <br><br>Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.<br><br>Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the &ldquo;colored&rdquo; ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta&rsquo;s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia&mdash;a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo&mdash;to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. <br><br>Henrietta&rsquo;s family did not learn of her &ldquo;immortality&rdquo; until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family&mdash;past and present&mdash;is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. <br><br>Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family&mdash;especially Henrietta&rsquo;s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother&rsquo;s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn&rsquo;t her children afford health insurance?&#160;<br>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;<br>Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, <i>The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks</i> captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.