Review of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

This non-fiction book has become an international bestseller, charting a remarkable story that consumed the author for a decade.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer whose cancer cells – taken without her knowledge – became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first ‘immortal’ human tissue grown in culture, HeLa cells were vital for developing polio vaccine, helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization and gene mapping, and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta herself remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the ‘coloured’ ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to East Baltimore today, where Henrietta’s children and grandchildren live, and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family – especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into Space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?

Reading a variety of scientific articles and books over the years, I’d already heard about these remarkable HeLa cells and was prompted to track this book down when I read about it in the New Scientist. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks follows an amazing story, helped by Skloot’s vivid writing which grabbed me by the throat and sucked me into this incredible tale. I was appalled at the grinding poverty endured by the Lacks family and horrified at Henrietta’s treatment which seemed every bit as barbarically brutal as anything you’ll find in Tudor apothecary notebooks. It didn’t help that Henrietta was coloured at a time when the south was divided along institutionalised racial lines. However, I don’t think poor Henrietta stood a chance against the rapacious cancer that ripped through her – the sheer toughness of those cells that are still going strong today, decades after her death, is a testament to the aggressiveness of this particular cancer.

Henrietta was only thirty-one when she died, leaving behind a young family. A good portion of the story deals with the painful grief of children who were never given sufficient information to come to terms with their mother’s involuntary role in a whole number of scientific breakthroughs. While the rest of the world marvelled at the sci-fi headlines describing the HeLa cells and their contribution to humankind’s knowledge, Henrietta’s daughter was riven with horror at that thought that some debased Alien-type version of her mother was locked up in a laboratory somewhere, enduring endless torment.

In America, the law currently says that once patients have had growths/moles/tumours removed, these tissues are no longer belong to them. Furthermore, if researchers and biotechnological companies find a useful gene or cell, they are entitled to sell off these portions for a profit – and American citizens can’t do anything about it, according to the latest Supreme Court ruling. However, this book isn’t in the business of portraying scientists as unfeeling villains – George Gey who removed the tissue sample from Henrietta and was responsible for growing it on, worked tirelessly on the project and freely allowed other scientists around the world access to the HeLa cells, making it possible for the large number of advances and scientific investigations to occur.

What this book starkly highlights is that the myth that science can somehow operate outside the messy business of living, is just that – a myth. The fact that a bunch of cells harvested from a young woman dying of cancer were responsible for a number of number of medical breakthroughs, doesn’t alter the fact that her children suffered by being completely ignored by that process. And if Rebecca Skloot hadn’t arranged for a portion of the royalties from her book to go towards a foundation to help Henrietta’s descendants, the hard fact is that they probably would be still unable to afford medical insurance.
10/10

Review of The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons

The authors, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, won the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology for Gorillas in Our Midst, a groundbreaking and world-famous experiment where they asked volunteers to watch a 60 second film of students playing basketball and told them to count the number of passes made. About halfway through, a woman dressed in a gorilla outfit strolled to the centre of the screen, beat her chest at the camera and then walked away. Half the volunteers missed seeing the gorilla…

Yep. It made my jaw drop, too. Unless you’ve already heard of the experiment, of course. Many people have, by all accounts. But before you shrug your shoulders and dismiss it as yet another oddball piece of human behaviour that doesn’t really apply to everyday life, just stop and think of the ramifications for a long moment. And if your imagination still fails you, then pick up this book and read on. You need to know what it has to say. Really.

A policeman called Kenny Conley, while chasing an armed criminal, failed to notice a brutal beating by fellow officers nearby. In a crackdown aimed at making an example of the officers involved, Conley was accused of perjury and obstruction of justice. During the trial, the jurors couldn’t believe he ran past the beating without noticing it. He was sentenced to thirty-four months in jail and fired from the Boston police force, after the Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal. However, when Chabris and Simons published their findings, they were contacted by a reporter who had begun to believe that Conley was telling the truth. Based on their evidence, there was a retrial, at which point it was shown that as Conley was entirely focused on the armed criminal he was chasing, it was highly likely that he didn’t notice anything else. Finally in 2006, Conley was reinstated by the Boston Police Force and awarded over $600,000 in back pay and the following year, he was promoted to detective. This is just one of the amazing stories that the book charts as it challenges a raft of our assumptions about ourselves and what we can do. We generally over-estimate our ability to multi-task; instinctively believe people who project confidence, whether or not they are competent; rely on our snap decisions for more heavily than we should; and think we are more capable than we are—with some scary consequences.

Despite the fact that it is written by two psychology professors, the writing style is clear and accessible, while the subject matter is absolutely riveting. If you write any kind of fiction, I highly recommend this book to you. It will give you all sorts of counter-intuitive evidence you can use to tweak those off-the-wall scenarios you have swirling around in your head.

On a more mundane yet vital level, if you are in the habit of conducting long conservations using a hands-free phone during car journeys, then you should urgently read Chabris and Simons’ findings on what that does to your ability to drive your car safely. Basically, they discovered that while folks are chatting on the phone, their driving is significantly impaired. However, if you are talking to a passenger, the same impairment doesn’t occur…

If you don’t pick up any other non-fiction book this year, I urge you to read this one. Your life may depend upon it.
10/10

Review of Swahili for the Broken-Hearted by Peter Moore

When Peter Moore visited the West Sussex Writers’ Club to talk about his travels and the books he wrote about them, I bought a copy of Swahili for the Broken-Hearted.

Peter embarked on his African adventure in an effort to escape his misery after his long-term girlfriend and former travelling companion dumped him. He decided to travel overland from Cape Town to Cairo by using a combination of public transport and lifts from people he met along the way. He is good at befriending people.

I’d expected to read a series of adventures delivered with the author’s laconic Aussie understatement that would leave me chuckling – while deeply grateful that it wasn’t me out there experiencing them. Well, that part was right. The sheer physical rigour of travelling in knee-buckling heat over cratered roads that wouldn’t look out of place on a battlefield in an overcrowded bus or train for hour upon hour, shouldn’t be underestimated. And I bring it up because, while Peter gives those facts a mention – his toughness means that conditions get really dire before he starts moaning about them. And the book is generously sprinkled with amusing tales – like the indignation of his drinking buddies in a South African township over his choice of beer when buying a round. Apparently, he’d bought them a woman’s drink so they thought he was insulting their manhood.

I was impressed by his deft, insightful character sketches and his sympathetic, unsentimental account of the grinding poverty and corruption he encountered. And there is an awful lot of poverty. Like the pavement sellers weeping when forced to part with their wares at prices they couldn’t afford. Things we take for granted – like adequate safety standards on public transport – are non-existent. To the extent that many Africans were shocked on learning that he was travelling on local buses and would warn him they weren’t safe.

Every so often, events would slide from the farcical into the outright dangerous – like the riot that Peter nearly walked into in Addis Ababa where he escaped by hiding in a coffin-maker’s shop while the mob outside destroyed a Toyota pickup truck.

The spare writing style ensures the book moves along at a brisk pace, with quick, clear descriptions as each new scene unfolded along the journey. My one niggle is that I would have preferred a few more word pictures throughout the book. It is, after all, a tale of travelling.

Those of you who attended the meeting will already know that Peter possesses sufficient self deprecating charm to stop a charging rhino and his amusing anecdotes left me slightly unprepared for the sombre undertone running through the book. As you’d expect of someone fleeing a broken heart, his mood is rather melancholy – which aptly reflects the appalling plight of many Africans in their daily lives. I was struck by the Zimbabwe man who told Peter that Jesus would soon be coming again as described in the Bible – as we were living through the end-time of war, plague and famine.

I had picked up the book anticipating an amusing romp through a part of the world I’d known as a child. What I actually got was a far more thought-provoking account of a continent in crisis – without any moralising or political harangue. It’s a neat trick to pull off and Peter Moore ably manages it. I think the jokey blurb on the cover sells this book short and despite the fact that travel books aren’t normally among the piles beside my bed, I shall be looking out for his other work.
8/10

Review of Why We Lie by Dorothy Rowe

When was the last time you told a lie? Why did you do so? This interesting and carefully researched book delves into a destructive aspect of human nature that most of us spend a lot of time not thinking about. Rowe’s extensive experience as psychologist and evident interest in history, politics and science gives her a very broad basis for her fascinating insights into why we resort to lying from a very early age. Our sense of self is so precarious, argues Rowe, that we will do anything to preserve it – even lie to ourselves.

She has some sharp observations to make about those in her own profession who insist on continuing to follow the practices of Freud, even though his observations and studies have been superseded by modern techniques such as brain scans, which shows us that there is no inherent ‘inner core’ within each of us. Rather, our brain receives a mass of external information about the world around us and resolves this input into a pattern that we think of as ‘self’. However your ‘self’ is nothing like my ‘self’ because my touch, taste, hearing, vision and imagination that constitutes my sense of who I am, are quite different to your various sensory impressions. I found this first section of the book profound and absorbing as she explains just how we use lies to defend ourselves, make ourselves more likeable and bolster our own self esteem, in addition to preserving our fragile ‘self’. The explanations as to what impels people to lie were riveting and illuminating – I certainly recommend any student of human nature reading the book for this section, alone.

However, Rowe extends her analysis to the professions, business, religion and politics. By citing recent events, such as America and Britain’s ill-planned war on Iraq under the guise of seeking weapons of mass destruction, she contends that lies have cost lives and billions of dollars. She goes on to denounce the hypocrisy of bankers and businessmen who become enmeshed in scandals like that of Enron and more recently, the selling of sub-prime mortgages that led to the financial crisis which is currently making all our lives miserably insecure. Rowe is an Australian and it shows. She doesn’t pull her punches as she points the finger and wags it reprovingly at a number of well-known statesmen and financiers for their dishonesty and complete lack of guilt.

Whether you agree with her analysis or not, this book is a readable, thought provoking reflection on our society and a basic faultline in human behaviour that Rowe argues, we should all consider taking more seriously.
8/10