The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2010

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Foreword and PrologueChapter Summaries & Analyses

Foreword Summary

The author, Rebecca Skloot, explains that the book is a work of non-fiction: “No names have been changed, no characters invented, no events fabricated.” She re-created Henrietta’s life using interviews, documents, and medical records. Skloot also says that she has recorded the dialogue of her interviewees exactly as they spoke in their native dialects; one of the interviewees specifically requested this for authenticity.

Prologue Summary

Skloot explains the identity of the book’s subject. Henrietta Lacks was a black American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, leaving behind five young children. Before Lacks’s death, doctors took cells from her cervix, without her knowledge or consent, and used them for medical research. Known as the HeLa cells (pronounced hee-lah), Henrietta’s cells—the first human cells to stay alive in culture—contributed to some of the medical world’s most significant advances, including the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, and in vitro fertilization.

Skloot also explains her fascination with Henrietta Lacks:

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I’ve spent years staring at [Henrietta’s] photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever—bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world (1).

Her initial research suggested that Henrietta’s family, who knew nothing about the cells until 25 years after her death, felt they were exploited by the scientific world. A deeply religious family, they struggled to come to terms with the idea that their mother’s cells were still alive decades after her death.

Foreword and Prologue Analysis

In her foreword and prologue, Skloot lays out the project she spent 10 years researching. It is a non-fiction work about a black American woman who, for decades, was an unknown figure, despite the seminal role her cells have played in medical research.

Skloot goes on to say that, in the decade she spent researching the book, the most important figure was Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, whose religious and spiritual beliefs challenged Skloot’s scientific outlook and sparked a fascinating dialectic which forms the basis of the book: “The Lackses challenged everything I thought I knew about faith, science, journalism, and race. Ultimately, this book is the result” (7). The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is, therefore, not only the story of the HeLa cells and Henrietta herself, but also of her family, particularly Deborah, and “their lifelong struggle to come to terms with existence of those cells, and the science that made them possible” (7).