The blockbuster book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" will be made into an HBO movie starring Oprah Winfrey, as first reported by Deadline.
Rebecca Skloot, the book's author, said she was "ecstatic."
The world should be too.
"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" was not just a sensation — it spent four years on bestseller lists — but also the most important science book of our time.
If you still haven't read it six years after its publication, you should. You must.
It's a complex tangle of a narrative and a crash course in biology and medical ethics, but it's also an utterly engrossing page-turner. No summary can do it justice.
But here's one anyway.
The story begins with Henrietta Lacks, a black woman with a complicated story who died from an especially aggressive form of cervical cancer in 1951. She left behind five children and her cells — nicknamed HeLa — which doctors had decided to try to grow in a lab without ever asking her permission.
Those quickly multiplying cells became the first human cells scientists ever grew successfully, and they continued to grow — to this day — making countless medical advances possible and spawning tens of thousands of scientific studies.
Meanwhile, everyone forgot about Lacks herself; her own children didn't learn about the fate of their mother's cells until decades after her death. (By then, the cells had even been sent to space.)
After more than a half century of obscurity, Skloot's book put the spotlight back on Lacks herself.
As Lisa Margonelli wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" covers "the interplay of race, poverty, science and one of the most important medical discoveries of the last 100 years. Skloot narrates the science lucidly, tracks the racial politics of medicine thoughtfully and tells the Lacks family's often painful history with grace."
It's a rich, expertly woven narrative that took the author 11 years to write. But it's also much more.
It's packed with science more interesting than most of what you learned in high school, bringing the practice of experimentation and discovery to life with vivid and artful explanations. It shines a light on the twisted racism that's long been embedded in the practice of medicine, something everyone in the US should know about — especially those who have the privilege to have never experienced it firsthand. And Lacks' story is perhaps even more relevant today, when we can learn so much about a person just by looking at a blood sample or a few cells.
When it comes to the importance of medical privacy, the stakes have never been higher.
If a movie version exposes more people to the story of Henrietta Lacks and the crucial issues laid bare by the book, then that's a good thing. But "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" is a riveting work of literary nonfiction, one that will be read for generations.
So we'd recommend picking up the book before it makes the jump to HBO — but then also watching it, so you can experience this once-in-a-lifetime story all over again.
