I’m sure none of us know what all lurks in our genes, although when we take a look at the children we spawn, we get a pretty good idea.

For one Baltimore woman back in 1951, it was a virulent form of cancer.  Henrietta Lacks felt something hard like a marble growing near her cervix. Rebecca Skloot writes, in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, that Henrietta underwent a few radium treatments, but nothing her doctors did could outpace the cancer. She died quickly.

The doctors saved a sample of her cancerous tissues, something they often did back in the day. Unlike other cells, Henrietta’s never died off. Doctors shared the replicating cells with other labs.

Today, countless labs trace the human tissues in their vials back to Henrietta or, as the scientific community calls her, HeLa.

Henrietta’s descendants never learned of this until decades later. Their reaction?

1) How could you do this to our mother?

2) Y’all are making millions and we haven’t seen a dime of it.

That experimentation on body tissues should spook Henrietta’s grown children is understandable, given that they learned about HeLa about the same time they heard of the infamous Tuskegee experiments. Those were the ones, you may recall, in which researchers left syphilis-infected black men untreated just to observe the progress of the disease.

Oh, and the Lacks family is black.

Skloot’s main interviewee is Deborah, Henrietta’s daughter, who was only a baby when her mother died. Deborah has difficulty grasping what all the cell business is about. Explain to her that her mother’s cells have gone into space, or that scientists ran nuclear tests on the cells, and Deborah can’t stop exclaiming, “You sent my mama into space?” and “You blew up my mama?”

Deborah is drama personified. Sometimes she hangs up when Skloot calls. Other times, she’s feeling friendly, eager to tag along on Skloot’s research trips. Which is helpful, except that Deborah turns into the person you really, really wish you hadn’t invited to your slumber party. She wakes Skloot up at all hours—”I’m thinking about pancakes!” “Thought I’d say hi!”

In some nonfiction books, the author hides herself, presenting only the neatened-up story. It was a Tuesday morning in a broken-down neighborhood next to a shipyard . . . In others, the author inserts herself into the action. I opened the box. I took a bunch of notes. Skloot’s book is the second kind. And we return again and again to Henrietta’s children and their superstitions about her cells. “I think them cell is why I’m so mean,” says her most troubled son.

If the ethics of medical research fascinates you, Immortal belongs on your book pile.

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Immortal was my beach book this week, because I went on vacation.

Which means  I didn’t cook much. Depositphotos_22213275_m-2015

We gathered all our kids together and took turns cooking.

And sometimes it’s the simplest things that make you sigh at the dinner table.  “You’ve never had mayonnaise and lime juice on your corn, Mom? Try it! It’s good!”

It was.