A friend at church gave me ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ by Rebecca Skloot. She said that she had ended up with 2 copies and thought I would find it interesting reading. Glancing at the cover I thought it was a novel but it is definitely not. This is real life in all its unfairness, pain and strange and unexpected eventualities.
In the mid twentieth century Henrietta Lacks was an African American living on the wrong side of the tracks in Baltimore, a short drive from the famous John Hopkins hospital. Her family were only a couple of generations away from slavery and their trust of hospitals and white doctors was nearly zero. However, in severe pain and distress Henrietta visits the hospital (still at this time with totally segregated wards) and is found to have cervical cancer. Her treatment, which sounds horrific, was I think pretty standard for the time but she did eventually die, being found to have many tumours on her internal organs.
Without her knowledge, let alone permission, samples of her cells had been taken. The science of cell culture was very new and most of the samples taken died quickly before they could be of any use to doctors and scientists. Those taken from Henrietta did not and indeed lived and replicated with exciting abandon. They became known as HeLa cells … pronounced hee lah … and have been instrumental in producing the vaccine against polio, treatments for AIDS and a whole variety of enormous advances in medicine. And, for two decades her family knew nothing about this.
Eventually of course writers and journalists realised there was a story here, searched for the family and were aghast that her relatives were totally ignorant of what had happened and was still going on in laboratories around the world. Because cell culture was in its infancy the law had not caught up. Was anyone allowed to profit from a patient’s cells? Could cells be removed and experimented on without explicit permission? In the event of a patient’s death did the family become the owners of their relative’s cells? At the time it was clear that no laws had been broken but the moral and ethical situation was a jungle and no one was quite sure of the way through.
The author of this book: Rebecca Skloot, makes a close but difficult relationship with Henrietta’s wide ranging and vastly extended family. It was through her detailed retelling of hours of conversations and telephone calls that strangely I began to have an understanding of why, during the recent pandemic, so many ethnic minority communities, particularly African and West Indian, had such difficulty with accepting the efficacy of the Covid vaccines. History, culture and religion all played a large part in their distrust.
I have never read anything quite like this before. It was fascinating.
So, one evening last week the casserole was simmering happily in the oven but no one was quite ready to eat yet. I poured myself a glass of wine, sat down and turned on BBC2 to watch Sara Cox and Between the Covers. There I found Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Nigel Havers having an intense discussion about a book called: ‘How to Read Water’ by Tristan Gooley. It sounded really interesting and before I served dinner I had pressed the button and primed a copy. ( I’m sure there is a whole article to be written about verbs, verbifying, gerunds and gerundives but not here or now.) To prime, to me, means that there will be the Amazon flop of a cardboard envelope, large enough for a paperback book and small enough for the letterbox the very next morning. As indeed there was. I have had so much practice in delayed gratification but in this situation it isn’t necessary. What luxury.
‘How to Read Water’ is a hybrid of a book, part science and part poetic prose. I loved the tiny observational details that were set in front of me: the way a small amount of water on a plate will actually go up slightly at the edges, the way in which after rain, water droplets will hang from the tip of a leaf as if trying to defy gravity.
I am surrounded by water: lakes and ponds on my walk to M&S, the River Wye running beside my front garden, puddles a plenty in my rutted and pot holed lane and the small pond in my garden which offers a lesson in surface tension as I watch pond skaters and other insects seemingly do the biblical walking on water thing. I enjoy the stillness of watching and there is much of that in this book but there are also explanations and detailed diagrams. As I watch the way ripples form as my small river turns a corner or more scarily, watch the conflicting currents as the Thames forces its way through one bridge after another in London, I know that there will always be a scientific reason for why things happen as they do. However, for me the poetry and the wonder will always be more important.
This is a book I will return to, particularly to read again the chapters on the sea; constantly fascinating, mesmerising and frightening in its latent power.
I’m glad I watched Between the Covers that evening. I’m not at all sure I would have picked this up in Waterstones.