In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, author Rebecca Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks’ ‘immortal cells’ — cells taken from a tumor on her cervix and kept alive to multiply in laboratories around the world — and how Lacks’ children discovered...

Henrietta Lacks, a poor African-American woman and mother of five, never knew that she revolutionized medicine. Shortly before she died of cancer in 1951, doctors took a tissue sample from her — without her permission. Those cells became the first human cells to gain...