The novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is divided into 3 sections: life, which tells the reader about Henrietta's life and the birth of HeLa; death, which consists of the times after Henrietta's death, and finally; immortality, which discusses how Henrietta's cells became immortal. Overall, the book is based on Henrietta, her children's lives, and how they deal with the way medical science treated their mother. Although the book is not written in chronological order, Skloot does a good job of organizing his information by his section. The first section, Life, tells the reader about HeLa's beginning. Henrietta's symptoms began shortly after the birth of her fourth child, Deborah. Henrietta felt a knot inside her, but after just a week Henrietta was pregnant with Joe, her fifth and final child. Four and a half months after having Joe she started bleeding but it wasn't her time of the month. She asked her husband, Day, to take her to the hospital. At the Johns Hopkins gynecology clinic, the doctor took a small sample of her lump to send to the pathology lab and sent her home. A few days later, she got the results that said the lump was “epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, stage 1” (Skloot 27). While hospitalized, she received radium treatment, and while she was unconscious, Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr., "shaving two dime-sized pieces of tissue from Henrietta's cervix: one from her tumor and one from healthy cervical tissue nearby" and placed the samples in a glass dish (Skloot 33). His cells were given to George Gey's laboratory assistant, Mary Kubicek, who handled most of the tissue samples at Hopkins. So far, all the specimens that Mary Kubicek had tried to grow had died. She was handed Henriet… midway through the paper… when “HPV inserted its DNA into the long arm of her eleventh chromosome and essentially turned off her P53 tumor suppressor gene” (Skloot 213). This allows cancer cells to produce monstrously virulent cells, making them difficult to kill. Sixty years later, HeLa cells are still one of the most popular cells in the world. They were not taken voluntarily, but they were one of the greatest contributions to society. Without them many viruses would never have had a cure and hundreds of people would have died. However, as Henrietta lived, her cells were taken away. Without his life and death, his cells would never have become immortal as they are today. Its cells continue to help and cure people from diseases and viruses that other cells would not be able to help. Works Cited Skloot, Rebecca. The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Corona, 2011. Print.