Henrietta Lacks was a poor African-American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia who died in 1951 of cancer at the age of 30. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge -- as was the custom then -- turned out to provide scientists one of the most important tools in medicine. Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, the story of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.