My brother-in-law once exploded in rage while watching the sight of a grieving family weeping on television over the loss of a body part of a loved one. Something had been removed and used for research and they wanted it back. ‘What does it matter?’ he cried. ‘When you're dead, you're dead!’

If you share that view, you will not be moved by The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, even though the jacket predicts that the book will take Britain by storm.

Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer at the age of thirty-one in October 1951. Her adult children were enraged when learning much later that their late mother's cells had been taken and used in research all over the world. Some of the cells had been shot into space.

Literary Review

Jul 2010

Categories

Brenda Maddox

I Ate All the Chocolates

Fallen from the Trees

For Love or Money

The Woman Behind the Wheel

He Promised Her the Nobel Prize

Better When Young

No One Saw Him Paint

The Adjunct’s Tale

Yeats The Protestant

Of Rears And Vices

Awful Apparatus

In A Word: My Wife

Coming of Age in White City

The Columbus of Politics

Ypres On The Liffey

She Sold Seashells

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Infinite Mischief

No To Nostalgia

Books Maketh the Man

Reading the Rocks

The Wizards of Id

On the Stein Trail

The Pernicious Editor