Immortal Life is an excellent study of the human faces behind the world of bioresearch and patent research using human genes. Rebecca Skloot traces the history of He-La, the cells that will not die, and becomes part of the world of the family Henrietta left behind. Her meticulous research reveals the injustice of the segregated wards of John Hopkins and the motivations of early cell researchers who sought not personal profit but scientific advancement. The book raises important questions about who should gain from these bio products and how a market in human genetics can inhibit as well as encourage science. The singular achievement of Skloot's work, though, is the portrait of the Lacks family as she breaches the barriers of their anger and gains their trust. Immortal Life is as much a study of how our society has treated those who are powerless as it is a treatise on a perpetually-multiplying cluster of cells.