BOOK OF THE DAY: The Immortal Life of Henrietta LacksBy Rebecca Skloot Macmillan, 358pp, £18.99

CERVICAL CANCER is usually a predictable disease, going through pre-cancerous and non-invasive phases, detectable by screening and amenable to treatment. But not always: this reviewer will never forget a 19-year-old patient in whom cancer of the neck of the womb behaved in a most aggressive manner. Despite extensive surgery and other treatment, the cancer ran riot in her body and she died four months after initial diagnosis.

Henrietta Lacks, the subject of science writer Rebecca Skloot’s fascinating book, also died of cancer of the cervix. She too was unlucky; a black tobacco farmer from rural Virginia, mother of five children, she died in 1951 from an aggressive form of the disease, aged just 31. And she might have remained just another statistic if her cells, removed at biopsy, had not changed the face of medicine for more than half a century.

It all started when Lacks, complaining of “a knot on my womb”, came to the “coloured” wards of Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.

At her first examination a piece of her cervix was removed for testing. Unknown to her, part made its way to George Gey, a tissue culture researcher at the hospital. Despite extensive research, he and others had failed to grow human cells. But Lacks’s cells grew like wildfire, and coding them HeLa, Gey sent them to labs around the world.

HeLa cells continue to form the basis of clinical research.

Bizarrely, Henrietta now weighs far more than she ever could in life: one scientist estimates her cells now weigh in the region of 50 tons.

They were used to develop the polio vaccine, and have helped our understanding of genetic diseases and to assess the damage nuclear weapons might cause to human cells.

More than 10 years in the making, the book reflects Skloot’s tenacity in reaching beyond the suspicions of the Lacks family. Feeling burnt by the system, their frustration is best summed up by this quote from Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah: “Truth be told, I can’t get mad at science, because it help people live . . . But I won’t lie, I would like some health insurance so I don’t got to pay all that money every month for drugs my mother’s cells probably helped make.”

Skloot writes with sensitivity about race, class and education. The divide between the black community and medical science is palpable, and is dealt with thoughtfully. But the reader is left in no doubt that, when the Lacks story became public, it was regarded locally as another example of a black person’s body being exploited by white medicine. The author details the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which poor black men with syphilis were studied but not treated with penicillin, while doctors recorded the disease’s effects on the dying.

Science writing is often dry and factual. This compelling book is anything but: as the pacy narrative unfolds, you feel the author’s passion and the family’s pain as they grapple to understand how Henrietta’s cells have become part of a multimillion-dollar industry.

You understand how, at one point, they become convinced that through cloning, they can recreate their mother.

You also begin to question whether, in a medical context, you have control over your own cells. Despite advances in medical ethics and informed consent, could someone profit from your tissue as it begins its journey through the hospital system?

Muiris Houston is a medical doctor and health analyst with The Irish Times