Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

HeLa cells may have commenced medicine's most complex and controversial ethical dilemmas. This book could therefore have been an exploration of both historical and contemporary perspectives on the use of patient cells in medical research. Regrettably, Rebecca Sloot merely summarizes these issues, choosing instead to dedicate a substantial portion of the book to quoting Henrietta Lacks's families personal struggles. Although the family's circumstances were and are difficult, their challenges are neither unique nor a consequence of research on their mother's cells. Further, although Ms. Sloot seems to desire to portray the family positively, she includes unnecessary details about them, often making them pitiable and even unlikeable. Finally, Ms. Sloot's deplorable writing skills detract from the ability of this book to serve as either a biography of Henrietta and her family or as a history of the HeLa cells and their use in medical research. Instead, the book is at best a catharsis for Ms. Sloot personally, terminating more than a decade of research and interviews. Although this book fills a mere 300 pages, it is still too long, and feels like a high school student's attempt to meet a minimum word count. Ms. Skloot may have tried admirably to obtain information to offer a biography of Henrietta and humanize the story of HeLa cells, but that information seems not to exist largely due to the brevity of Henrietta's life. The story is much better suited for a feature magazine article. Unfortunately for Ms. Sloot, that article was already published in Rolling Stone (as she mentions several times in the book) in the 1970s.