That is the name of Rebecca Skloot's excellent book on the subject: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Life_of_Henrietta...)

I don't know about a sci-fi story, but the non-fiction book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot is friggin amazing.

I'm pretty sure that they found out a few years earlier about what had happened and the lawsuit only happened it 2013, but I could be mistaken. If I recall correctly, in the book (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks) the author told Henrietta's daughter about it around 2005(?)

The book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks just came out recently. Amazon picked it as their book of the year. My girlfriend, a bio-molecular & chemical engineer, just read it and said it was fantastic.

http://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/14000...

I read "The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks" a few years ago, really fascinating book. Highly recommend it.

For the interested, I can highly recommend "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" - http://www.amazon.com/The-Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1...

Michael Crichton's novel "Next"[1] was a fantastic exploration of the implications of such issues being brought up here like: liability when the infringing patents are in you, in animals, in human-animal hybrids capable of human-level intelligence, and how the world deals with life when Man plays god.

Another excellent book on the ethics of bio-engineering and patentability is the true story, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks."[2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_(novel)
[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Immortal-Life-Henrietta-Lacks/dp/1...

What is your take on "single topic" investigative journalism books? Like "The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks"[0] or Bob Woodward's "All the president's men"

I'd love to recommend "Abusado", by brazilian journalist Caco Barcellos, but unfortunately it does not seem to be available in English

[0](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Life_of_Henriet...)

It's terribly sad this is on "Today I found out." I learned about HeLa cells in high school biology, and the story really stuck with me. But when I took The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks out of the library (published this year, and an incredible book up for many awards) my public health faculty SO had never heard of her or the cells.

The contribution of HeLa cells to modern biology is simply unfathomable. They were the first cells to be cultured and the only ones that could be for many years. If it weren't for them, modern biology would have been pushed back many, many years. Every person who has ever been through public schooling should know her name. Which is why I was so happy Skoot wrote this book, because now more people do.

There's plenty of popular science books that are written by respected scientists - Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Stephen Hawking - as well as books that are effective summaries of accepted information by laypeople, such as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (which interweaves the history with first-person narrative of the author's interactions with Lacks's living relatives) or The Big Bang by Simon Singh.

There's also lots of blogs written by laypeople or former researchers who carefully distill and contextualize individual scientific papers, such as many of the folks at Discover Magazine blogs (Phil Plait, Ed Yong).

Moreover, there's a larger problem of lay journalists, public, and many university PR people treating every bit of research as a groundbreaking answer to a huge question, when the reality is that each paper is merely a bit of dialog in a massive conversation about the nature of our universe. This leads the public to become rightfully distrusting of the massive overstatements, and therefore tragically disinterested in the nuanced conversation behind it all.

So perhaps the single best thing to do is become part of the conversation! Follow authors and bloggers on social media, talk to your friends in science, furrow your brow at bombastic university press releases and seek the nuance. This will lead you to the best books, articles, and science communicators out there.

I can appreciate your frustration, but when you look at the history of things like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or read a book like "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" the distrust becomes more understandable. As per the RFS biotec comments (http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/), and given the expressed intent of certain groups to develop the ability to annihilate entire ethnic groups, the fears are not unfounded. Consider how many still fervantly endorse Darwinism. Consider this quote from his popular book (the title of which is often truncated):

"On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

The exact reason for this is actually very well detailed in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which was published this year.

For one, one man did, but he was a con artist that made the family hesitant to ever talk to anyone again. When Rebecca Skoot went to interview the family for the book, they accused her of being his crony. It took her 10 years to write this book, partly because it took that long for them to open up to her.

The other half of the reason is that lawyers have, and they've gotten nowhere. There's actually a rather long legal precedent in the U.S. that the tissue taken from a person in the course of a medical treatment doesn't belong to them. It is considered medical waste, and part of the argument is that restricting its usage would hurt medical progress. This is why it is perfectly legal for hospitals to sell the foreskin of circumcised infants to pharmaceutical companies, for instance.