Life and afterlife of woman who will live on forever

Henrietta Lacks died of cancer at 31. Her cancer cells have been used for research. Photo / Supplied

Henrietta Lacks, the poor black tobacco worker who died in 1951 without knowing that her cells would be used to treat millions of patients through vaccines and research, could be the most important woman in modern medicine.

This week, she extended her dominance to the publishing industry.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the story of Lacks' remarkable life and death, written by American science writer Rebecca Skloot, won Britain's Wellcome Trust Book Prize, a £25,000 ($51,400) award celebrating medicine in literature.

Skloot's work has also been named Amazon's Best Book of 2010, beating Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

Henrietta Lacks entered the New York Times bestseller list at No5 when it was released in the United States in February; it was published in Britain in June to widespread acclaim.

Henrietta Lacks has been described as a biomedical thriller and chronicles the tale of how the 31-year-old's dead cancer cells were removed from her body without her family's permission when she died at a Baltimore hospital from cervical cancer.

After her death, scientists grew Lacks' tumour cells in a laboratory, the first time a human cell line had survived outside the body.

Since then, HeLa cells (an abbreviated version of Lacks' name) have been used to develop polio vaccines, in vitro fertilisation techniques and in genetics research, to understand cancers and to manufacture drugs for herpes and influenza.

More than 50 million tonnes of her cells have been grown since she died and their use has been acknowledged in more than 60,000 scientific papers, with 10 new studies added to the list every day.

Skloot charts the tribulations of her impoverished relatives and the author's obsession with the "Henrietta mystery", namely how such an influential figure ended up being buried in an unmarked grave in a clearing just outside Roanoke, the small town in rural Virginia where she grew up.

Lacks was confirmed as the source of the cancer cells only in 1973, to the surprise of her relatives. In 2001, HeLa cells were trading at US$167 a vial. Her descendants have never received a cent from her gift to science.

"This cell line is used all around the world and revolutionised cell biology because they grew so well in culture," said Professor William Earnshaw, principal research fellow of the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Cell Biology.

"They are used to answer a wide variety of questions and yielded a huge amount of information. We use them to study how cells grow and divide."

The story's relevance to black society has made the book particularly appealing to parts of the US public.

The exploitation of Lacks has been portrayed as another example of the mistreatment of black Americans in the pursuit of medical science.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, carried out between 1932 and 1972, saw scientists observe how untreated syphilis slowly and painfully killed African American men. Penicillin, which could treat the affliction, was developed in the 1940s.

Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, creator of True Blood, are producing a film based on Lacks' story.

- Independent