In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot—alongside Deborah Lacks and the rest of the Lacks family—tells the story of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cell line that was made from her. It’s a bookfull of grief and frustration with a racist medical research industry. It’s a book about science and history. But mostly, it’s a book about the stubborn determination and resilience of the Lacks family. Much of the book is in their own words.

I first heard about this book from one of my classmates, who read it for an essay project in an English class. Once I started working in a research lab and doing experiments in human cells, I felt is was important that I read it too. I’ve used HEK293T cells, 3T3 cells, and U2OS cells. I have not used HeLa cells. However, the HeLa cell line—created using cells taken from Henrietta Lacks’s cervical cancer tumor—was the first immortal cell line ever created, and paved the road for basically all of the tools of modern cell culture.

George Gey (pronounced like “guy”)—the scientist who took Henrietta Lacks’s cells—took them without informed consent. While this was legal, it certainly wasn’t ethical. Although Gey never tried to patent HeLa cells or make money from them (in fact, he gave them out to every researcher he thought might find them useful, and refused to start a commercial cell culture firm), that doesn’t what he did right. And other groups did make money off of the cells, including a firm that would later become Invitrogen (a branch of the enormous Thermo-Fisher Scientific corporation). We still don’t have laws in place to fully prevent something like this from happening a second time. Skloot discusses ethics throughout the book, and moves onto the laws and conversations on patient rights in tissue sampling at the end of the book—it’s a great read to the very end.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks spans nations, scientific fields, and history. If you’re interested in history or social justice, you should read this book. If you’re interested in anything in the sciences, and especially if you’re interested in medicine, then you need to read this book.