Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I teach an Introduction to Clinical Medicine course in a medical school and this book was a summer reading assignment. The class spent last Wednesday discussing and debating the book and I was grateful to discover that many of the students in the class felt the same way I did - they really disliked this book. I've summarized many of the reasons why the students and I developed such strongly negative opinions of "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" here: 1. The author has created a mythology. By referring to Henrietta somehow being "alive" is falacious. The cells are not Henrietta - in fact they are the opposite of Henrietta. The cells are anti-Henrietta and are what actually killed her. Do you cry and worry over the hair that's left on the floor of a barbershop after a haircut? How about your nail clippings? What about baby teeth or a wart that is burned off? What is,the difference between any of these things and Henrietta's cells? The family were uneducated and superstitious and to continuously refer to the cells and somehow "being" Henrietta was a confusing and cruel fantasy. 2. Why did the author inject herself into the story? Is that what historical biographers are supposed to do? Frankly, the only part of the book that isn't salacious, pandering, Jerry Springer-level anthropology is the 13 page Afterword, which is actually a well-written and thought-provoking essay. Now Ms. Skloot is forever linked to this pseudo-story, not as an objective observer but as a character in her own fevered imagination. It is a tremendous effort at self-promotion and glory-seeking which throws a dark shadow over the believability of any of the events of the story. 3. The author creates many 2-dimensional characters that are either all good or all bad. Cases in point- the elderly couple with the Confederate flags in the living room, Galen the sexual-predator uncle and Christoph, the noble and sympathetic scientist. 4. The author makes transparent attempts to link totally disparate events so that they seem to have something in common and almost cause and effect. Example - the descriptions of injecting the prisoners with cancer cells and the Nazi experiments (Chapter 17) can only remotely, peripherally be construed as having ANYTHING to do with HeLa cells. It's comparing apples to oranges and these conversations have no place in this book. 5. The family seem to expect that they are owed something because they are recipients of a genetic lottery ticket by their (in many cases) tenuous associations with Henrietta's DNA. For example - her husband Day can arguably be described as the person responsible for Henrietta's cancer, as he was the person most likely to have infected her with syphilis and HPV - why should he or any of the other extended family financially benefit from the hard work of the geneticists and scientists that developed the successful cell cloning techniques? 6. The whole Lacks family are depicted as intellectual children and borderline retarded. 7. Why did the author use the convention to colloquialize the speech of the minority characters (the Lacks and Susan Hsu the Chinese lab assistant) but not any of the other foreign characters? Christoph Lengauer was born and raised in Austria. He studied human genetics/biology at the Unviersity of Salzburg, Austria. Dr. Lengauer received his PhD from the University of Heidelberg, Germany and went for his postdoctoral studies to the IMP (Institute of Molecular Pathology) in Vienna, Austria. He then joined the group of Prof. Bert Vogelstein at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. I cannot believe that Dr. Lengauer doesn't speak with an accent, yet the author elected NOT to colloquialize his speech or any of the other non-minority characters. This was probably the single most offensive thing about this book. It is condescending, sanctimonius, patronizing and probably racist. 8. Why is Zakariyya depicted as a sympathetic figure? He is a murderer, a drunk and a violent societal parasite. Compare this with the depiction of the fake lawyer (Cofield). I'm not fan of lawyers, but as far as we know, Cofield never killed anyone. Why is Cofield a terrible, albeit bumbling villain, yet Zakariyya is someone that deserves sympathy and pity? These were some of the main points that came out in our discussion. Some of the students initially said that they enjoyed the book and they "felt sorry for the family", but once we actually began teasing apart the numerous problems with the novel, every student agreed that what we read was not the story of Henrietta Lacks or of HeLa cells, but instead the story of Rebecca Skloot and her naked ambition for fame.