Books Like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Science, Race, and the Body as Property
Rebecca Skloot's account of HeLa cells — taken without consent from Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who died of cancer in 1951, and used in medical research for decades — is the best science book written for general readers and the most important book about medical ethics in recent memory.
By Elena Marsh
Rebecca Skloot spent more than ten years researching The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and the book that resulted in 2010 is one of those rare works of narrative nonfiction that changes how you see an entire domain. Skloot tells three stories simultaneously: the scientific story of HeLa cells and their role in twentieth-century biology; the biographical story of Henrietta Lacks herself, a Black woman from rural Virginia who died in 1951 and whose cells were taken without her consent; and the contemporary story of Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who grew up not knowing her mother’s cells were alive in laboratories around the world, and who wrestled with that knowledge for the rest of her life. The combination is devastating.
What makes the book so important is the intersection it reveals. HeLa cells are not just a medical anomaly — they are the product of a specific set of social conditions: the segregated hospital that treated Lacks as a second-class patient, the medical culture of the 1950s that did not think informed consent applied to tissue samples, and the research economy that turned biological material into intellectual property while the family of the woman it came from remained in poverty. Skloot is careful never to make HeLa a simple story of exploitation, because the science genuinely matters and many of the researchers who used the cells were not consciously acting in bad faith. But she is equally clear that good intentions do not resolve the questions the case raises.
The books below were chosen for readers who responded to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’s particular combination: narrative science that is genuinely accessible, the history of race and medicine in America, and the question of what the body is and who owns it. They range from other works of narrative medical nonfiction to fiction that imagines the ethical implications of treating bodies as raw material.
Science and Medical Ethics
#1 — The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Mukherjee’s biography of cancer — its history from ancient Egypt to the targeted therapies of the early twenty-first century — is the most comprehensive account of the disease that killed Henrietta Lacks and that her cells have been used to fight. The Emperor of All Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 and is written with a literary quality unusual in science writing: Mukherjee moves between individual patients and the history of oncology, between laboratory science and clinical practice, with the skill of a novelist as well as the authority of a practicing oncologist. HeLa cells appear in the larger story as one of the crucial tools in the long war against cancer, which gives Lacks’s story its full scientific context.
#2 — Do No Harm by Henry Marsh
Marsh, a senior British neurosurgeon, writes about his practice with an honesty about failure, uncertainty, and the power differential between doctor and patient that is rare in medical memoir. Do No Harm is not a history of medicine but an account of what it feels like to operate on human brains — to make decisions with imperfect information whose consequences are irreversible. The book shares with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks an unflinching examination of the ways medical institutions can fail the people they are meant to serve, and a willingness to hold the genuine achievements of medicine and its genuine ethical failures in view simultaneously. Marsh’s account of the conversations he has (and fails to have) with patients about risk and consent is particularly relevant to Lacks’s story.
#3 — Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
Gawande’s investigation of how medicine fails dying people — by prolonging life at the cost of the quality of that life, by avoiding the conversations that might allow patients to make informed choices about their final months — is the most important book about institutional medicine written for a general audience. It belongs on this list because the institutional failure it describes is continuous with the failure that shaped Henrietta Lacks’s treatment: a medical culture that tends to see patients as bodies to be managed rather than people to be served. Being Mortal is more hopeful than The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks — Gawande describes efforts to improve end-of-life care — but it is equally clear-eyed about how far the institution still has to go.
Race, Body, and American Medicine
#4 — Beloved by Toni Morrison
Morrison’s novel about Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman living in Ohio in 1873 who is haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed rather than allow her to be returned to slavery, is the deepest literary exploration of what it means for Black bodies to be treated as property. Beloved and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks are linked by a history: the same logic that made enslaved bodies the property of slaveholders — that Black people’s physical existence could be owned, used, and disposed of by white institutions — is the logic that made Henrietta Lacks’s cells available for commercial use without her consent. Morrison’s novel is not a comfortable read, but it is an essential one for understanding the full historical weight of Skloot’s story.
#5 — Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington
Washington’s history of medical experimentation on Black Americans — from the antebellum South, where physicians practiced surgical techniques on enslaved people, through the Tuskegee syphilis study and beyond — provides the essential context for the Lacks case. Medical Apartheid is not narrative nonfiction in the way Skloot’s book is; it is a work of historical scholarship, and it is more relentlessly grim. But readers who want to understand why Henrietta Lacks’s family was so suspicious of Johns Hopkins, why they distrusted the researchers who came asking about HeLa, and what history stood behind that distrust will find it indispensable. Washington was writing the book at the same time as Skloot, and the two works are natural companions.
#6 — The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Alexander’s argument — that mass incarceration in America is a system of racial control that functions as the successor to Jim Crow laws — belongs on this list because it addresses the same systemic racism that shaped Henrietta Lacks’s world, in a different institution. The same America that built segregated hospital wards built the carceral state, and Alexander’s rigorous account of how that system was constructed, how it is maintained, and what it does to the communities it targets gives Lacks’s story its broader social context. The New Jim Crow is more polemical than The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, but it is arguing about the same country.
#7 — Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
Stevenson, a civil rights lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, writes about his work defending people on death row — many of them wrongly convicted, nearly all of them poor and Black — with the moral clarity of someone who has spent decades inside the American legal system’s inequities. Just Mercy is narrative nonfiction structured around individual cases, particularly that of Walter McMillian, a Black man convicted of murder in Alabama and sent to death row on fabricated evidence. It shares with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a structure — the individual story as a lens on systemic injustice — and a commitment to making the human cost of institutional racism visible and undeniable.
Narrative Science and the Hidden Story
#8 — Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Harari’s history of the human species — from the cognitive revolution of seventy thousand years ago to the biotechnological present — gives The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks its widest possible context. Harari is interested in the same questions Skloot raises about what human biology is and who controls it, but from the scale of species history rather than individual case study. His chapters on the scientific revolution and the emergence of modern medicine provide the framework within which HeLa cells are not an aberration but a logical product of a particular moment in human history. Sapiens is the book that makes everything else feel both more consequential and more legible.
#9 — The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Mukherjee’s intimate history of genetics — from Mendel’s pea plants to CRISPR gene editing — is the companion volume to The Emperor of All Maladies and a direct engagement with many of the ethical questions Skloot raises. HeLa cells were central to the molecular biology revolution that The Gene describes: they were used in early experiments on cell division and genetic expression that laid the groundwork for everything that followed. More broadly, Mukherjee’s account of the history of eugenics and the ways genetic science has been used to justify racial hierarchy gives Lacks’s story another dimension of historical weight. Like The Emperor of All Maladies, it is written with literary seriousness and scientific rigor.
#10 — Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro’s novel is set in an England where human beings are bred and raised specifically to donate their organs — kept alive through multiple donations until they “complete.” The students at Hailsham, the novel’s school for donor children, know their fate but cannot quite bring themselves to fully understand it, and the novel’s devastating power comes from that quality of suppressed knowledge. Never Let Me Go is the fiction that imagines the ethical endpoint of the Lacks case taken to its logical extreme: people designed to provide biological material, their humanity acknowledged but never quite acted upon. Ishiguro is never didactic — the novel is quiet, elegiac, devastating — but its argument about what happens when society treats people as biological resources is the most powerful fictional response to the questions The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks raises.
How to Choose Your Next Read
If you want the scientific context for HeLa: The Emperor of All Maladies — cancer’s biography, and HeLa’s role in fighting it.
If you want the essential American racial history: Medical Apartheid — the context for why the Lacks case is not an isolated incident.
If you want the deepest literary exploration of body as property: Beloved — Morrison’s novel, the history behind the history.
If you want the fiction that takes the ethics to their extreme: Never Let Me Go — Ishiguro’s elegy for bodies treated as resources.
If you want the broadest context: Sapiens — human biology and history at species scale.
For the Best Biographies and Memoirs
For the definitive guide to biography and memoir across history, politics, and science, see our Best Biographies Ever Written list.
More Non-Fiction and Memoir Guides
- Books Like In Cold Blood: True Crime and Narrative Journalism
- Books Like Educated: Memoirs About Survival and Finding Yourself
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Henrietta Lacks and why does she matter?
Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman from rural Virginia who was treated for an aggressive cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951 and died at thirty-one. During her treatment, a sample of her cancer cells was taken without her knowledge or consent and sent to a researcher named George Gey, who discovered that her cells — unlike any human cells previously cultured — could survive and reproduce indefinitely in a laboratory setting. He named them HeLa cells. Those cells went on to be used in the development of the polio vaccine, in cancer research, in the study of AIDS, in genetics, and in thousands of other scientific applications. They have been bought and sold in quantities worth billions of dollars. Henrietta Lacks's family received nothing, and they did not learn of HeLa's existence until decades after her death.
What ethical questions does the book raise?
The book raises several interconnected ethical questions that remain unresolved. The most fundamental is consent: Lacks never agreed to have her cells taken, cultured, or sold, and the question of whether patients own their biological material — or whether it becomes the property of the institution that processes it — has been litigated repeatedly without settled resolution. The book also raises questions about racial justice in medicine: Lacks was treated at the segregated ward of Johns Hopkins, and the history of medical experimentation on Black Americans provides the context for what happened to her. Finally, the book asks about the distribution of benefits from scientific research: who profits from discoveries built on material taken from people who were never compensated.
Is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks appropriate for younger readers?
The book is generally recommended for readers aged fifteen and up. It deals with cancer, death, and medical experimentation in direct but not gratuitous terms. The sections dealing with Lacks's daughter Deborah, who struggled psychologically with the revelation of her mother's scientific afterlife, include some emotionally difficult material. The racial history sections describe the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and other abuses in frank terms. Many high school teachers assign the book specifically because its ethical questions are accessible and genuinely debatable, and because it combines narrative drive with real scientific and historical content.
