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IN 1951, Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in Baltimore, Maryland. Weeks before, her doctor had removed a sliver of her tumour and preserved it. Lacks’s body ended up in an unmarked grave, while – named HeLa – can today be found by the trillions in virtually every biomedical lab on Earth.

Rebecca Skloot does a good job explaining the science of this immortal cell line, and a superb job with the often tragic history of Lacks’s family, whose already hard lives were ripped still further apart when they learned, very belatedly, what had been done with her cells.

Every facet of both tales is overshadowed by racism: Lacks was treated in the “coloured ward” of Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the scientists and corporations that turned her cells into an important and profitable tool never notified her husband or children. Skloot deserves great credit for her dogged pursuit of the truth under often terrifying circumstances.