In 1951, an impoverished young black woman named Henrietta Lacks developed a case of cervical cancer so vicious that, 50 years later, her attending physician still remembered the tumor. Before the woman died in the "colored" ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital, scientists collected a tissue sample from the mass and put it in a lab dish. For years they had tried and mostly failed to grow human cells in culture. To their amazement, Lacks's cells grew and divided, grew and divided; fed the proper nutrients, they doubled relentlessly every 24 hours. To this day, "HeLa" cells are wildly popular for research on everything from cancer drugs to environmental toxins. As Lacks's daughter Deborah tells the journalist Rebecca Skloot, "Them cells are still livin' today, still multiplyin', still growin' and spreadin'."

The reader learns all this and much more thanks to Skloot's remarkable reporting in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which tells the full story of these cells: from the obscure life of their tobacco-farmer originator, to the laboratories around the world where the cells live on, to their legacy for the Lacks family today. We all have HeLa cells to thank for their role in developing the polio vaccine, in vitro fertilization, gene mapping, and drugs to treat AIDS, among many other advances.

They have also played a critical role in the rise of environmental medicine by broadening our understanding of how factors outside the body affect our individual health. HeLa cells were used to document how gamma rays and an endless stream of toxins, hormones, and environmental stressors assault human cells and DNA. The field of toxicology is rapidly changing, and HeLa has been there every step of the way. Researchers are now looking beyond how external agents cause obvious DNA mutations to discover how our environment triggers epigenetic changes -- that is, how genes in "normal" DNA can be turned off and on in ways that make us behave differently, metabolize differently, and become ill in much sneakier fashion.

Skloot is particularly concerned with the human story behind HeLa and the ethical issues it raises. Lacks never gave permission for her cells to be used in research, and for decades her children had no clue that a part of their mother was still very much alive. While biotech and pharmaceutical companies made billions from selling HeLa or the drugs made possible by HeLa cells, many of Lacks's human descendants suffered, with no health insurance, from undertreated medical conditions. Even today, as Skloot notes, medical patients have surprisingly few legal rights when it comes to their tissue samples, which may be stored without consent and then used for research, even when those tissues contain genetic information with the potential to generate enormous profits. In a world where genes are now patented, living tissues become one more commodity.

In the story of HeLa, Skloot has unearthed a fascinating -- and landmark -- instance of the way in which environmental ethics and medical ethics overlap. In effect, Skloot wonders aloud, perhaps human cells should be treated not like garbage but like natural resources to be managed and respected.

In one moving scene, two of Lacks's children meet Christoph Lengauer, a scientist at Johns Hopkins, who shows them what her "ethereal fluorescent green" cells look like under a microscope. Lengauer is the first medical professional to acknowledge aloud the shoddy way the family was treated. He tells them he thinks human cells should be handled like a Texas gusher: both the oil company and the landowner share the profits. Other experts have suggested managing cells like intellectual property, with royalties going to the owner, while still others believe nature's material should remain in the public domain for all to use.

At the very least, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks makes a strong case for the notion of informed consent, as our living tissues seed the rich new fields of genetic research.