The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
After decades of being lost to obscurity, this biography sheds light on the life of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman whose cancer cells were taken without her consent or knowledge, and studied to ultimately revolutionize the field of modern medicine as we know it.
This book expounds on the hardships and injustices that Lacks endured during the Jim Crow era, as well as the intense pain of her radiation treatments for cervical cancer while in a segregated ward. It's a compelling interplay between race, ethics, and the medical field, as well as a deserving immortalization of Lacks, because her very cells helped to develop life-saving vaccines and gene-mapping techniques long after she herself had passed away.