Rebecca
Skloot
As
i has happened in the past, i am caused fascination by the effect on
my brain that this book had, as well as by the book itself. This is
the story of Henrietta Lacks,
the woman behind the HeLa line of cells, a line which is proving to
be essentially immortal, which has been of incredible importance in
the history of medical research over the past sixty years. Actually,
like all good books of its kind, this is far more than just the story
of Lacks; it is also the story of her family, of some of how the cell
line has been used by scientists, the story of how Lacks' family was
treated and maybe exploited by those scientists, and the story of how
Skloot herself tracked down and developed her story.
First,
though, i want to focus on what is always, perforce, first to my
attention: Mine own brain, mind, and their reactions to the book. I
knew from the instant that i saw the title on the library shelf what
the essential subject of the book was; how? I have no idea at all of
how i knew who “Henrietta Lacks” was or what HeLa is, but i did;
i can imagine, and have, that i may have read a Reader's Digest
article once upon a time, or somehow come across the name in an “A”
level or university biology class or text. The problem, though, with
both those scenarios, and any other i can think of, is that Skloot
documents pretty thoroughly where Lacks' story was told in the
Seventies and Eighties, and they don't seem to fit in with her
time-lines, and my “feeling of knowledge” for lack of a better
term, meaning how it feels to me, when it seems that i learnt it, is
that i have known this for that long. So i am left puzzled by mine
own knowledge: How did i know this? Where had i come across HeLa,
and how had i heard the name Henrietta Lacks? More than that, there
were other, more obscure, points in Skloot's narrative that were not
~ or did not seem to be ~ new to me; either i have read in some
detail in the past of this subject, or i have just been the victim
(if that's the correct word) of a particularly elaborate deja
vu episode. And the
latter possibility worries me, because if it is true then i cannot
trust my knowledge about my knowledge.
Enough
self-indulgent maundering, and on to the book itself. As mentioned
above, it is far more than just a review of historical facts about a
scientific advance. The most touching parts of the book are those
when Skloot describes the way that the whole of Lacks' family have
suffered, been taken advantage of, with the essential justification ~
whether or not the scientists involved consciously thought it ~ that
the end justified the means, that it was not illegal, and they were
Black and uneducated and therefore second- or third-class citizens
anyway. How completely they had been abused by the process is shown
in the levels of suspicion that Skloot had to fight through before
she was able to earn the trust of the family. The story is horrible;
Skloot tells it with such compassion that the reader is fully drawn
in and made a part of it, as happens with the best of fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment