first time Mary has actually seen a dead body and she nearly retches as she watches Dr. Wilbur, the pathologist, cut Henrietta open and begin to take pieces of her internal organs. 

Nearly all of Henrietta's organs had been under attack by cancer.

Tumors the size of baseballs had nearly replaced her kidneys, bladder, ovaries, and uterus. And her other organs were so covered in small white tumors it looked as if someone had filled her with pearls.

Wilbur determined her official cause of death to be poisoning from all of the toxins which stayed in her body because it was unable to release them through the urethra (which was squeezed shut by tumors). It is hard for Mary to look at this body impersonally once she notices that Henrietta's toenail polish is a little chipped. Somehow this detail makes Henrietta a real person to Mary, though Mary has been helping to grow the HeLa cells in the laboratory.

After several days, Henrietta's body is returned, on a rainy day, to Clover where the family displays it for several days (also rainy) of viewing and a funeral. Sadie also notices Henrietta's chipped toenail polish and immediately starts to cry. She realizes now how much pain Henrietta must have been in to let them get into this condition. 

Henrietta is going to be buried in the back of the property, just as other members of her family have been; however, there are so many other caskets there that her cousins keep thumping into them with their shovels as they try to dig her grave. Finally they bury Henrietta in a grave near her mother's tombstone, and suddenly the skies open up in a torrent of rain and wind. 

A nearby barn roof is torn off and flies over the grave as the cousins are trying to fill the hole and protect the casket. Trees are uprooted and a nearby relative's house is blown over in the storm, killing the cousin inside it. Later, when everything about Henrietta's cells is discovered, one of Henrietta's cousins says, looking back,

“We shoulda knew she was tryin to tell us somethin with that storm.” 

Until the book was published, no one knew much about Henrietta Lacks.  Her family did not and does not benefit financially from the HeLa line of cells.

The book travels back and forth in time as it explores the author’s research into genetic research and the Lacks family.  Going chronologically, one thing is clear. The family really never benefitted from the commercialization of Henrietta Lacks’s genetic material.  In fact, the afterward notes that at the time the book was published there were still few laws regarding ownership of human cells.

As Skoot acknowledges, there are “important issues regarding science, ethics, race, and class” raised in Henrietta’s story.  In the introduction, she explains how she tried to address them fully.

…I’ve done my best to present them clearly within the narrative of Lacks’s story, and I’ve included an afterward addressing the current legal and ethical debate surrounding tissue ownership and research. (p. xiv)

The main point is that after Henrietta’s death, many people made a lot of money off of her cancer cells.  She never consented to have these cells removed and used as scientific research, let alone being branded and sold.  Although the name of the cell line, HeLa, does seem to acknowledge the cells’ origin, clearly most researchers were not aware.  This was what interested Skoot enough to write the book in the first place.

Yes, Henrietta is immortal in a way.  Her cells can exist without her, and have for decades.  Yet her family still lives in poverty.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks concludes with chapter 38 and an afterword. In the last chapter, author Rebecca Skloot reviews developments between the time she completed the book manuscript in 1999 and her return to Clover ten years later. Upon arriving in town, she found that most of it had been demolished.

Skloot shares the conversations she had with Sonny after a period of failed efforts to communicate with Deborah. He informed her that his mother had died. He also told her about some health problems he experienced and related financial difficulties, primarily a necessary but very expensive surgical procedure. Skloot also provides updates on several grandchildren, including Davon’s and Erika’s educational aspirations.

The afterword moves away from the Lacks family’s personal story to consider the broader changes in medical ethics and related legal issues in the years since Henrietta’s death. She explains the recent reconceptualization of informed consent and ownership of tissue and other biological materials. Skloot also reviews the widely varied approaches and related difficulties of retroactive action, as several families attempted to recover relatives’ materials from research institutions. As of 2009, the Lacks family generally experienced pride in the impact of their relative’s contribution but were not planning to pursue legal action against Johns Hopkins.

In one sense, as the title indicates, this book tells the story of cell tissue that never actually "died," and is still very much alive today, and how this amazing immortality has been of incredible benefit to the world. However, the physical, corporal life of Henrietta Lacks, the lady that died as a result of the amazingly vigorous and immortal cancer cells, was very much a temporal person. Her life and death are described in Chapters 1-11, Part One of the book, with her death occuring in Chapter 11. This particular section of the narrative of Henrietta's life is very tragic, as it describes the immense pain Henrietta experienced in her final days as the cancer took over her body and eventually killed her. The title chapter, "The Devil of Pain Itself," refers to the description of one of Henrietta's family members of the wailing and crying that Henrietta emitted in her last few days:

Suddenly her body went rigid as a board. She screamed as a nurse ran to the bed, tightening the straps around Henrietta's arms and legs to keep her from thrashing onto the floor as she'd done many times before. 

After being prescribed only painkillers and morphine, Chapter 11 concludes with the death of Henrietta on October 4th, 1951. Of course, this, for Skloot, is only the beginning of the remarkable story of Henrietta Lacks, and the rest of her book tells this tale.

I'm not sure that there is a climax in the book. It is a biography of Henrietta Lacks, so it deals with her life, her family and the contributions her cells have made to science. The book is actually as much about Henrietta Lacks as it is Rebecca Skloot's pursuit of information on Henrietta. If you want to consider a turning point, I would suggest the moments when Skloot uncovers more of Henrietta's life and certainly the moments when Henrietta's impact on cancer research becomes more publicly known and acknowledged. One such moment occurs in Chapter 28, when a medical conference was held in Henrietta's honor and the Lackses were invited. In addition, the BBC began filming a documentary about her. 

In Chapter 32, Rebecca accompanies Zakarryia and Deborah to Johns Hopkins where they actually witness one of Henrietta's cells dividing. They are surprised to hear Christopher Lengauer admit that Johns Hopkins "screwed up" by never communicating with the Lacks family. Uncharacteristically, Zakarryia is silent on the way home, prompting Deborah to tell Rebecca that she just witnessed a miracle. This is a defining moment in the biography because they actually see Henrietta's cells and they get some acknowledgment from Johns Hopkins that they had not properly handled the acknowledgement of Henrietta's and her family's contribution.