The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Y

Wow, I really enjoyed this book and have raced through it. Something really different, well written and highly interesting. it's a mix of social history, poverty, race, ethics, biology and an amazing history of cell research. The cancerous cells of this woman,who died in Maryland in 1951, have become the standard for so much research over the world.  Without Henrietta's cells there would be no modern vaccines. (polio would still be killing people)  no modern chemotherapy drugs, and no world standard for human cell research. Her cells replicated perfectly and never died. They were like a magic porridge pot for cell researchers in the 1950s. her cells were called Hela and are still used prolifically all over the world.  

So far so good, but Henrietta's family never found about their Mother's cells until 20 years later when a variety of scientists, con-men and TV reporters turned up at their door.  The scientists wanted more cells from close relatives to do more research into genomes and the reporters of course wanted a story.

Anyway things went badly for the extended Lacks family.  They were angry that drug companies had made money from their mother without their knowledge and they were highly ignorant about what cells were. Nobody sat down with the family and explained what their mother had done for science and that there were no clones of Henrietta wandering around. 

The Lacks family are extremely poor and ill educated. A family with their roots in tobacco farming.The kids all left school before 14 and were never good in school anyway because of their congenital deafness never being diagnosed. ( a symptom of Henrietta marrying her cousin.) The grinding poverty of their lives is extreme and in complete contrast to the other strand of the story about cell research in labs all over the world by scientists.

Anyway, in the late 90s the author of this book managed to get the trust of the family and through years of research and persistence this book was written.  In the end it's a tribute to Henrietta and how out of her hard life something good appeared. ( her cervical cancer cells were so aggressive due to HPV and constant syphillis infections from her playboy husband.) Infact the HPV vaccine is only here because of Henrietta's cells.

As for the ethics of this book this has been complicated for me.  The story is a product of the American health system,the American education system, grinding poverty and race. The Lacks family are rightly angry that they are too poor to have health care and benefit from the the products which their mother 's cells helped to create but also they were all so badly educated they were living withsome strange godly fear that Henrietta still felt pain when her cells were tested on. Scientists are not the evil group in my opinion.  Johns Hopkins hospital/ University never sold Hela cells and shared their research with other scientists freely.  It was only when the cells had to be made on mass that drugs companies started to turn a profit on them. The problem is the health system in which the Lacks were embedded  A system which demonises the poorest and weakest in the community. 

The idea of informed consent did not exist in the 50s and doctors took samples from all cancerous biopsies from this hospital at the time. Henrietta just happened to be the perfect case. No cells ever reproduced in culture as well as hers. 

Anyway, if any of the above topics are interesting for you and you have a strong stomach then read this book.  It really made me think, the science was fairly easy to understand and the Lacks family story was interesting, irritating, annoying and heartbreaking all at the same time.  All I can say is thank god I don't have to deal with the American health system!  As for the history of black only wards and black only toilets and secret syphillis testing on the black wards in Tuskegee...it's a history that has to be read to be believed. 

The Secret Garden

My mate Nicky of Newcastle facebooked me a few weeks back to see if I had ever read this. She pursuaded me to get out my copy and reread it. So I did, a book I have had for over 35 years. I haven't read it since I was about 11 though and I know I really loved it then. Would it be the same as an adult?!

Well, I really enjoyed it. It is such a great book to read when you are feeling down, unloved and grumpy because these words describe the two main characters, Mary and Colin. Their personality and physical changes throughout the book are really amazing.  Their spoilt, selfish ways are the perfect antidote for each other and slowly they change to much happier and healthier children. And like them, you also get a real life enhancing boost when you read this book.

The garden though is the main pull of this book.  it is absolutely magical and even now, so many years later I could so quickly imagine again this absolutely amazing secret place. I could see it all laid out so perfectly. the mystery, the magic and the secrecy are so well described.  It really was still as exciting as when I read it as a kid.  This is weird for me because I hate gardening ( although I have done some today.). But I can still appreciAte the magic as these kids begin to grow and feel loved through this connection with nature. And the descriptions are just so vivid. Almost real.  (maybe all these clear pictures are because I read it so many times as a kid and the images all just came flooding back!

 Through the vivid descriptions of nature, growth, change and elemental forces and through rooting for 'Mary, Mary, so contrary,' you just feel really uplifted. You kind of think, if these spoilt revolting brats can change for the better then there is hope for me!

It's interesting to think about the few adult characters in the book. The only two caring adults seem to be dickon's mUm and Weatherstaff. Mrs. Medlock just can't be arsed with the kids and Mary's Mum was an ex pat socialite in India who just wanted to forget that Mary ever existed.  

I always loved the freaky beginning of the book when Mary's entire family and servants all die of cholera. That Mary stays alive through drinking wine dregs left at a banquet table is brilliantly grotesque! The levels of unstated abuse and neglect in this book are astounding.

As for Colin's dad, he is just pathetic.  Stuck in mourning for Colin's dead Mother and totally unble to sort himself out until he has 'a moment' in Italy and  realises that the soul of his wife is calling him back to the garden. 

 

Also, I wish Colin wasn't in the book so much.  his preaching and whinging and irritating ways got on my nerves a bit and because  I loved Mary I found that her voice was just pushed out of the limelight.  By the end it's all Colin's story.  he kind of hijacks it.

As for Dickon, wow, what a boy.  I fell in love with him all over again! only now do I see him as a Yorkshire based Peter Pan .  I'm sure he's still on the moor today with his whistle, his squirrels and his lamb. 

A Carpet Ride to Khiva

V

Yippeeeee. Finally after a long drought I finish a book. I have been trying to plough through 100 Years of Solitude and finding it impossible to pay attention or really care. I gave up.  Finally I feel like I have resurfaced from literally 100 years of pretentious boredom.  I've read it before and supposedly liked it. But I think I was dillusional at the time! 

Anyway, this book was great. A bit slow at the beginning but once it got going I couldn't put it down. (Plus now my kindle has upgraded I'm a bookworm again.)

I thought it would be a travel book about 7 years travelling along the Silk Road from China to Turkey, but it wasn't. The British guy writing his memories  lived in Khiva in Uzbekistan for seven years in his late 20s and early 30s. He is the same age as me (or thereabouts.) so lots of his history reference points are similar to mine.

He vividly created what life in Uzbekistan was like. A country in mad flux between Islamic traditions and collapsed Soviet policies. A country and an area which doesnt know it's place in the modern world. He desperately wanted to start a carpet weaving cooperative with help from UNESCO,employing women and local weavers who could remember the old local traditions of a skill which was totally dying out.

The beginning is a bit dull as he talks about settling in to this quite weird, Borat like hell hole of a place. I was beginning to wonder if he was sane to want to live in such a country. Thenslowly characters formed, stories were told and histories unfurled and the book began to race off in many directions.

I read about the history of carpet weaving in central Asia and how there isn't much local inspiration left. Most locals were making factory produced copies of Turkish carpets. The author took his first pattern from this one local fragment from the15th century. (The only bit left and residing in a museum in Greece.) 

He made up patterns, and also looked at old pictures and sourced natural dyes, ending up with a business which was able to sell great carpets to tourists.

It was interesting reading about the history of design and pattern in Central Asia and the great world of Islamic design.  Also the history of how Central Asians managed to sneak out the secret method from China on how to make silk and also how to get bright natural colours from madder Red and other natural sources.

Not only was it full of Central Asian history but also the stark realities of life in Uzbekistan now. How locals are victims of a strong Soviet system. How blind people and even just poor sighted people were totally institutionalised. How the KGB still works under a different name, the extreme corruption and how people open new mosques by celebrating with massive bottles of vodka.

I loved his trips into Afghanistan to get looms, dyes and materials and his wonderful descriptions of this country too. The fear of being a westerner, the way he wanted to start a factory here just to stop local woman getting more and more depressed whilst imprisoned in their homes. The hideous beaurocracy he had to deal with to get back over the border. The problems he had with culture and language and how finally the corruption and envy  towards his business caught up with him and he finally became blacklisted in Uzbekistan. The ending involves him spending time as a stateless person in aTajikistani airport lounge. 

He comes across as a pretty unassuming guy who falls in love with a mysterious and unknown part of the world. I enjoyed living it all through his memories. People, places, colours, smells ,art and history all came alive.

Anyway, well worth a read if you are into this kind of stuff! 

Midnight in Peking.

What a great read. Cheers Carmel for the recommendation.  This book was a factual report of the real life investigation into the murder of Pamela, a 17 year old English girl found brutally murdered and mutilated under a tower in Beijing in the early hours of Jan 6th 1937. 

It is an account of how the investigation progresses and all the hurdles, dead ends and cover-ups which are encountered along the way. It all happens against the backdrop of fear of Japanese invasion and civil war between nationalists and communists, with the Brits trying to hang on to their interests by a thread. 

I loved the claustrophobic build up of fear and tension and the madness of the people. Everyone knew invasion by the Japanese was imminent. These were the last days of old Peking, and my God, what a place!

I absolutely loved the atmosphere the author created.  The characters and sense of place meant you could almost smell the fear, corruption and poverty hanging around the city at the time. The history of Beijing is told so well through the people who inhabit this book, both dead and alive. The grimy back streets, the rickshaw drivers, the opium addicts, the whores and pimps, the poverty stricken stateless Russians who supported the Tsar, Chinese thugs/nationalists/communists, Japanese thugs/ fascists ,the Jews, Koreans, British beurocrats and civil servants trying to keep face, exhausted coppers, American dentists,  nude dancers, hermaphrodite Russian madams with a heart. A great cast! I also feel like I have a personal taste of the events which befell Beijing during the 30s and 40s. Good god, what a time.

 Suddenly I understood why the Brits and French had to live in legations. These quarters were the only areas which were safe because of uprisings and rebellions. Laws inside these legations were different; the Chinese and British policemen were banned from investigating within their boundaries. This was so the Brits could keep face under such traumatic historical events which were unfolding around them. The thought that there was a sadistic murderer amongst them was just too much to admit.

What happened to Pamela scared locals to death. it was a highly grotesque murder. She was a fluent mandarin speaker, a girl with spirit why on Earth was she so hideously murdered? If you want to find out and have an interest  in the darker side of life read this book! 

Never Let Me Go

I have been meaning to read this book for years and have purposely never watched the movie. I lovedRemains  of the Day and have been waiting for a time to get my teeth into this.

Well I read it in just 5 days and it totally took me away to another world and yes, I loved it. This book sells itself as being about clone children who are bred to harvest their organs. But in my opinion this book is not about science fiction at all.  Infact I think it's all about the way we deceive ourselves about what the future holds.  We all know we are going to die and probably get sick and in pain but we just accept this and blindly and live our lives without many questions. This book makes us think about what it means to be human and what things in life are important to us. 

Back to the book.  these kids are all bought up in the beautiful surroundings of Hailsham House and the first half of the book is written from a teenage girl's perspective.  it's so well written. I can't believe this author would be so capable of getting inside a young girl's head. he did though and it was extremely realistic. These kids are different and know they are different but they only get ghostly snapshots and rumours of the life which is waiting for them.  There are scary rumours about donating and the euphemistic, completing. ( dying.) but not much else. no parents, no histories, no idea of careers or jobs or TV or fashion of life outside.  These kids live in a bubble where they make gifts for each other and get second hand clothes delivered once every few months. They also spend a lot of time looking at people's faces in magazines trying to find out who they were cloned from. 

Most of the time though they are making and creating things. Half of their stuff is taken away by the mysterious Madame and put in a gallery(or so they believe.) I loved this part, the kids think that the artwork is being used to prove they have souls and that two people in the future can use their artwork from when they were young to prove their love for each other and hence defer donating their organs. This bit was very clever because religion and belief  are never mentioned in this book once. This world has no room for God and the author shows how these young people grab instinctively onto quite profound issues of being human: like love, belief in something and the power of friendships.

As the book contines it becomes more and more bleak. Pitch black bleak. The way these young adults just accept their fate is beyond me. They live in a world which ghettos these people and then completely abuses them in the name of medical science. (Nothing is ever written about what is taken out of their bodies but after 3 or 4 donations everyone of them is dead. It's good that he leaves the science to our imaginations.) 

  But this book is beautifully written and the day that Kathy and Tommy have together in Norwich is wonderful. (Sounds so boring, but in this book life is so dull for these kids, any day away is amazing!)

One thing this book will do is make you totally aware that you have to grab life full on and live it to the maximum. 

I like this link discussing why the kids never run away or rebel from the fate which awaits them. 

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/apr/01/kazuoishiguro

Divergent

This was the only book I read on my holiday apart from Guide books and maps.  Anyway it's been a while since I finished it and to be honest I can't remember much.  It was a sort of 'lite' version of Brave New World. For me it was more Enid Blyton/cartoonesque than hard hitting dystopian teenage fiction.

The idea though was great, people are born into one faction with certain traits which you have to follow and live by.  For instance Abnegation are a group of people who only think of the welfare of others and lead grey, puritanical lives, whereas candour are a group who believe that the most important quality is telling the truth at all times.   Anyway these groups take on new recruits when kids turn 16 and Beatrice ends up in the Dauntless faction,the  place where people have no fear and happily spend their free time jumping off moving trains and fighting their deep fears in simulated worlds. To be honest these different factions felt more like Houses in Harry Potter's school.  Good old Beatrice or Tris as she is known ends up being divergent, that means she has the brains and ability to behave in different ways depending on the circumstances. hence she doesn't fit easily into one group. Being divergent is very dangerous...poor old Tris is in serious trouble.

Anyway, the story goes on and on and to be honest I lost the will to live a bit whilst reading. (Although I was sucked in and had to finish it!)  This book is a semi- clone of The Hunger Games because characterisation is weak and completely one dimensional. The only thing which matters is an urgent plot full of strange violence.( Violence which failed to make me feel scared or raise my blood pressure. Violence which managed somehow to seem pretty damn lame, tame and dull.  maybe I'm just too dark!!!)   There was a rather annoying love interest theme too involving lots of looking at each other longingly, sighing and stroking bits of each other's bodies. The plot was really underdeveloped. This could have been so much better if the author had created a more believable world.  To be honest the Chicago of this awful future was not described at all.  Most of the plot just happened in the equivalent of a Hogwart's school playground.  Anyway the end was quite good. One ,because the story finally got fairly interesting and two, because it was the end.

The Happy Prince and other stories.

The Nightingale and the Rose.

The Devoted Friend.

Today on the bus I read 4 stories by Oscar Wilde.  God knows if I read the really,really easy peasy children versions on my kindle, or what, but by the end of my morning commute I had read all 4.
Anyway, they were great.   Loved them. Loved them, loved them!! I think I will read them all again tomorrow too.
 I especially liked the The Nightingale and the Rose. It was almost too painful to read as the beautiful singing bird slowly  impales her heart into the thorn of the white rose to give it the blood red colour. (To me verging a bit on the gory and the sexual...but maybe I was bit over sensitive  just because I was reading too early on a bus with an empty stomach!)  To top it all off, once the guy gets the rose it is rejected by the woman he loves, so he just throws it away. charming!
As for the last one...umm. Again the moral of the story is a bit twisted and rather difficult to get, but by the end I was totally distressed and angry  Thinking 'what the hell?'   Poor Hans being taken for such a devoted fool.  The hold of his twisted, rich landlord over him was tragic. To me the moral of this story was don't abuse your position of power and don't just blindly follow the rules and ways of others.
As for the first two.  They were just great as well.   The wonderful swallow and all-seeing prince on his podium.  And the grumpy old giant who has a second chance.
What a great journey to work.  Reading them has now made me want to pull out  my volume of Hans Christian Anderson. Bring on the Fairy Tales!

PS They were the original versions:
 http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/wilde.html#TALES