CultureWatch Reviews:The Tiger's Wife and Henrietta Lacks

Just as Natalia and Zora are setting out on their mission of mercy, Natalia receives the word that her grandfather has died, in the country of her destination. He had told her grandmother that he was going there to meet Natalia. Since she knows nothing of the putative meeting, she sets out to investigate his death, and to try to unravel why he has lied to her grandmother. The grandmother tells her that none of his things have been returned to her from the place where he supposedly died, and asks Natalia to track them down.

Although Natalia is the narrator of this story, much of it is also an 'as told to,' i.e. her re-telling of stories told her by her grandfather, as well as the folklore of her native region. Chief among these are the grandfather’s tale of Gavo, a man who cannot die, and also a story of a tiger that escaped from the zoo and took up residence in the forest, where a pregnant widow seemingly forged a bond with him, causing the superstitious villagers to refer to her as "the tiger’s wife."

There is also a disquisition on the Slavic tradition of the forty days, beginning the morning after the body’s death, that the soul spends wandering earth, visiting the places of its past. Natalia’s grandmother strongly believes in those days, although her grandfather had called the story a superstition.

The juxtaposition of folk tales with the very modern world of war and cell phones and vaccinations can be a tricky and distracting thing. Obreht manages to balance and even to juggle these appositions in ways that illuminate and enrich her story.

The Tiger’s Wife is a knockout novel that portends great things ahead, for both Ms. Obreht, and for her readers. Image from Amazon

Amazon: The Tiger's Wife: A Novel

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS
By Rebecca Skloot, ©2010 (Hardback)
Published by Crown Publishers, 369 pp; Paperback ©2011

Reviewed by Jill Norgren

The person who tells the story controls the story. Henrietta Lacks, the subject of Rebecca Skloot’s non-fiction best seller, did not have the opportunity to tell her story. Indeed, she died not knowing that she “had” a story. For many years Lacks’s husband and children were similarly ignorant that a powerful narrative began during Henrietta’s last days as a cancer patient.

In 1951 Henrietta Lacks, a twenty-nine year old African-American mother of five was dying of cervical cancer at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins hospital. Before Lacks died, a surgeon took samples of her cancer tumor. This tissue was passed along to Hopkins researcher, Dr. George Gey, whose technician placed the tissue sample in petri dish. For many decades, researchers had unsuccessfully attempted to keep human cells such as these alive in culture medium. Gey probably expected another failure, but Lacks’s cells were different. According to Skloot, immediately "they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory." In the world of science and medicine, this immortality represented a breakthrough that promised the possibility of new research into the causes and suppression of cancer as well as the development of drugs for treating a number of deadly and debilitating diseases.

Her cells came to be known as HeLa, and in not very much time established themselves as a "standard laboratory workhorse." One biology professor told his class that "HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years." In not too much time, HeLa cells were being sold for twenty-five dollars a vial. Commercially, this was just the beginning of a huge biological industry based on the use of HeLa as it was "brought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world."

Henrietta Lacks was never asked to consent to the culturing of her cells and when she died, David ("Day") Lacks, her husband, only reluctantly gave permission for more of his wife’s tumor to be taken during an autopsy. Henrietta Lacks was denied what New York State Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz, in another case, called the inalienable right of every human being "to determine what shall be done with his own body." For fifty years researchers carried out biological experiments with HeLa without knowing, or apparently caring, that there had been no consent, or that the commerce in Lacks’s cells did not benefit her family. Indeed, few scientists even knew the name of the woman who had unknowingly made this phenomenal contribution to modern biology.

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CultureWatch Reviews:The Tiger's Wife and Henrietta Lacks

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