The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

I have always been a fan of biology and cells. This is a non-fiction science book about a woman named Henrietta Lacks. Her cells, called HeLa by scientists, were taken without her knowledge and have been one of the most important tools in medicine. They were the first "immortal" human cells to continue growing in culture and are still alive today although she died from cancer sixty years ago.  In fact, if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons. HeLa cells were used for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects. It also helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping. I was amazed by the history in this book. During the time Henrietta was alive it was not uncommon for blacks to be kidnapped off the streets to be used for experiemental testing. They would also inject "voluteers" and prisoners with diseases like syphillis without telling them there was a cure. The book compared these events to being much like the experimentation that was done to Jews during the Holocaust. Most of the book was about the family's struggle to understand why they had been lied to about thier mother's cells and how they could be sold without their knowledge. The writer of the book was actually a reporter that was the first to earn the trust from the Lacks family. This was my first audio book, which may seem boring to some but it was great to hear different voices used to understand how people spoke.