The Immortal Life of Henrietta LacksExtra Credit Assignment due by Midnight April 8th
After reading “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” (found on Brightspace as a PDF for free,
but you may purchase the book if you want), complete any of the following prompts.
This assignment is worth up to 50 points, half a test grade, with each prompt being 10 points
each. For each one-two page prompt you complete- you get 10 points. If you complete all five
prompts, you get all 50 points. If you complete one prompt, you get 10 points.
Guidelines:
Choose any or all prompt(s) you would like to write about: make sure to state which
prompt you are referring to in your header (Ex: Prompt 1)
Write one-two pages to respond to each prompt
Writing style should be professional and scholarly
Use APA citation style INCLUDING when you are quoting or referring to the book
Prompts:
1.
2.
3. The book makes frequent reference to Henrietta’s “immortality,” derived from both the
continual use of her undying cells in scientific research and her significance in the lives
of her surviving relatives. Do you think either of these constitutes immortality? What’s
necessary in order for someone to be immortal?
In addition, one of the central controversies of the book is about the ownership of cell
lines. Do you think that the patient who donated the tissue should retain ownership of the
cell line, or should they pass to the ownership of the researcher who patented them?
4. Henrietta’s doctors did not tell her about certain important details about her medical
treatments, including the side effects of radiation and the terminal nature of her cancer.
Why do you think they did not disclose this information? How did Henrietta’s race and
gender impact her life? Why do you think Rebecca Skloot was able to get close to the
Lacks family when so many others could not?
5. How does the author depict the repercussions of the loss of a parent in the narrative? How
do you think Henrietta’s life would have differed if her mother had lived? How would
Deborah’s life have been changed? Examine the theme of poverty in the narrative. What
role did poverty play in the lives of the Lacks family? How does the author juxtapose this
poverty with the successes of HeLa?
MORE PRAISE FOR
The IMMORTAL LIFE of HENRIETTA LACKS
“No one can say exactly where Henrietta Lacks is buried: during the many years
Rebecca Skloot spent working on this book, even Lacks’s hometown of Clover,
Virginia, disappeared. But that did not stop Skloot in her quest to exhume, and
resurrect, the story of her heroine and her family. What this important,
invigorating book lays bare is how easily science can do wrong, especially to
the poor. The issues evoked here are giant: who owns our bodies, the use and
misuse of medical authority, the unhealed wounds of slavery … and Skloot,
with clarity and compassion, helps us take the long view. This is exactly the
sort of story that books were made to tell—thorough, detailed, quietly
passionate, and full of revelation.”
—TED CONOVER, author of Newjack and The Routes of Man
“It’s extremely rare when a reporter’s passion finds its match in a story. Rarer
still when the people in that story courageously join that reporter in the search
for what we most need to know about ourselves. When this occurs with a moral
journalist who is also a true writer—a human being with a heart capable of
holding all of life’s damage and joy—the stars have aligned. This is an
extraordinary gift of a book, beautiful and devastating—a work of
outstanding literary reportage. Read it! It’s the best you will find in many,
many years.”
—ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC, author of Random Family
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks brings to mind the work of Philip K. Dick
and Edgar Allan Poe. But this tale is true. Rebecca Skloot explores the racism
and greed, the idealism and faith in science that helped to save thousands of
lives but nearly destroyed a family. This is an extraordinary book, haunting
and beautifully told.”
—ERIC SCHLOSSER, author of Fast Food Nation
“Rebecca Skloot has written a marvelous book so original that it defies easy
description. She traces the surreal journey that a tiny patch of cells belonging to
Henrietta Lacks’s body took to the forefront of science. At the same time, she
tells the story of Lacks and her family—wrestling the storms of the late
twentieth century in America—with rich detail, wit, and humanity. The more
we read, the more we realize that these are not two separate stories, but one
tapestry. It’s part The Wire, part The Lives of the Cell, and all fascinating.”
—CARL ZIMMER, author of Microcosm
Praise for Rebecca Skloot’s
The IMMORTAL LIFE of HENRIETTA LACKS
Winner of 2010 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of 2010 Wellcome Trust Book Prize
Winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s
Young Adult Science Book Award
Winner of Goodreads.com Readers Choice Award for Best Debut
Author and
Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
Winner of BookBrowse.com Diamond Award for Best Book
Selected for More than Sixty Best of the Year Lists Including:
New York Times Notable Book
Entertainment Weekly #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year
New Yorker Reviewers’ Favorite
American Library Association Notable Book
People Top Ten Book of the Year
Washington Post Book World Top Ten Book of the Year
Salon.com Best Book of the Year
USA Today Ten Books We Loved Reading
O, The Oprah Magazine Top Ten Book of the Year
National Public Radio Best of the Bestsellers
Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
Financial Times Nonfiction Favorite
Los Angeles Times Critics’ Pick
Bloomberg Top Nonfiction
New York magazine Top Ten Book of the Year
Slate.com Favorite Book of the Year
TheRoot.com Top Ten Book of the Year
Discover magazine 2010 Must-Read
Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
Library Journal Top Ten Book of the Year
Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
U.S. News & World Report Top Debate-Worthy Book
Booklist Top of the List—Best Nonfiction Book
“I could not put the book down …The story of modern medicine and bioethics
—and, indeed, race relations—is refracted beautifully, and movingly.”
—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
“Science writing is often just about ‘the facts.’ Skloot’s book, her first, is far
deeper, braver, and more wonderful.”
—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a triumph of science writing …one of the
best nonfiction books I have ever read.”
—WIRED.COM
“A deftly crafted investigation of a social wrong committed by the medical
establishment, as well as the scientific and medical miracles to which it led.”
—WASHINGTON POST
“Riveting … a tour-de-force debut.”
—CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, Favorite Book of the Year
“A real-life detective story, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks probes deeply
into racial and ethical issues in medicine … The emotional impact of Skloot’s
tale is intensified by its skillfully orchestrated counterpoint between two
worlds.”
—NATURE
“A jaw-dropping true story … raises urgent questions about race and research
for ‘progress’ … an inspiring tale for all ages.”
—ESSENCE
“This extraordinary account shows us that miracle workers, believers, and con
artists populate hospitals as well as churches, and that even a science writer
may find herself playing a central role in someone else’s mythology.”
—THE NEW YORKER
“Has the epic scope of Greek drama, and a corresponding inability to be easily
explained away.”
—SF WEEKLY
“One of the great medical biographies of our time.”
—THE FINANCIAL TIMES
“Like any good scientific research, this beautifully crafted and painstakingly
researched book raises nearly as many questions as it answers … In a time
when it’s fashionable to demonize scientists, Skloot generously does not pin any
sins to the lapels of the researchers. She just lets them be human … [and]
challenges much of what we believe of ethics, tissue ownership, and humanity.”
—SCIENCE
“Indelible … The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a heroic work of cultural and
medical journalism.”
—Laura Miller, SALON.COM
“No dead woman has done more for the living … a fascinating, harrowing,
necessary book.”
—Hilary Mantel, THE GUARDIAN (U.K.)
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks does more than one book ought to be able
to do.”
—DALLAS MORNING NEWS
“Above all it is a human story of redemption for a family, torn by loss, and for a
writer with a vision that would not let go.”
—BOSTON GLOBE
“Skloot’s engaging, suspenseful book is an incredibly welcome addition for nonscience wonks.”
—NEWSWEEK
“Extraordinary … If science has exploited Henrietta Lacks [Skloot] is
determined not to. This biography ensures that she will never again be reduced
to cells in a petri dish: she will always be Henrietta as well as HeLa.”
—THE TELEGRAPH (U.K.), Best Read of the Year
“Brings the Lacks family alive … gives Henrietta Lacks another kind of
immortality—this one through the discipline of good writing.”
—BALTIMORE SUN
“A work of both heart and mind, driven by the author’s passion for the story,
which is as endlessly renewable as HeLa cells.”
—LOS ANGELES TIMES
“In this gripping, vibrant book, Rebecca Skloot looks beyond the scientific
marvels to explore the ethical issues behind a discovery that may have saved
your life.”
—MOTHER JONES
“More than ten years in the making, it feels like the book Ms. Skloot was born
to write … Skloot, a young science journalist and an indefatigable researcher,
writes about Henrietta Lacks and her impact on modern medicine from almost
every conceivable angle and manages to make all of them fascinating … a
searching moral inquiry into greed and blinkered lives … packed with
memorable characters.”
—Dwight Garner, NEW YORK TIMES, Top Ten Book of 2010
“Astonishing …No matter how much you may know about basic biology, you
will be amazed by this book.
—THE JOURNAL OF CLINICAL INVESTIGATION
“Rebecca Skloot did her job, and she did it expertly … A riveting narrative that
is wholly original.”
—THEROOT.COM
“Moving …”
—THE ECONOMIST
“Journalist Rebecca Skloot’s history of the miraculous cells reveals deep
injustices in U.S. medical research.”
—TIME
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a fascinating look at the woman whose
cultured cells—the first to grow and survive indefinitely, harvested without
compensation or consent—have become essential to modern medicine.”
—VOGUE
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a remarkable feat of investigative
journalism and a moving work of narrative nonfiction that reads with the
vividness and urgency of fiction. It also raises sometimes uncomfortable
questions with no clear-cut answers about whether people should be
remunerated for their physical, genetic contributions to research and about the
role of profit in science.”
—NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
“An indelible, marvelous story as powerful as those cells.”
—PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, Best Book of the Year
“As much an act of justice as one of journalism.”
—SEATTLE TIMES, Best Book of the Year
“A stunning book … surely the definitive work on the subject.”
—THE INDEPENDENT (U.K.), Best Book of the Year
“Graceful … I can’t think of a better way to capture the corrosive effects of
ethical transgressions in medical research. It’s a heartbreaking story, beautifully
rendered.”
—THE LANCET
“Read this … By letting the Lackses be people, and by putting them in the
center of the history, Skloot turns just another tale about the march of progress
into a complicated portrait of the interaction between science and human lives.
—BOINGBOING.NET
“[A] remarkable and moving book … a vivid portrait of Lacks that should be as
abiding as her cells.”
—THE TIMES (U.K.), Best Book of the Year
“I can’t imagine a better tale. A detective story that’s at once mythically large
and painfully intimate. I highly recommend this book.”
—Jad Abumrad, RADIOLAB
“Skloot is a terrific popularizer of medical science, guiding readers through this
dense material with a light and entertaining touch.”
—THE GLOBE AND MAIL (Canada), Best Book of the Year
“A rare and powerful combination of race, class, gender, medicine, bioethics,
and intellectual property; far more rare is the writer that can so clearly fuse
those disparate threads into a personal story so rich and compelling.”
—SEED
“Powerful story … I feel moved even to say on behalf of the thousands of
anonymous black men and women who’ve been experimented on for medical
purposes, thank you. Thank you for writing this important book.”
—Kali-AhsetAmen, RADIO DIASPORA
“Skloot has written an important work of immersive nonfiction that brings not
only the stories of Henrietta Lacks and HeLa once more into line, but also
catharsis to a family in sore need of it.”
—THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
“A masterful work of nonfiction … a real page turner.”
—Hanna Rosin, SLATE
“Skloot explores human consequences of the intersection of science and
business, rescuing one of modern medicine’s inadvertent pioneers from an
unmarked grave.”
—U.S. NEWS &WORLD REPORT
“Remarkably balanced and nonjudgmental … The Immortal Life of Henrietta
Lacks will leave readers reeling, plain and simple. It has a power and resonance
rarely found in any genre, and is a subject that touches each of us, whether or
not we are aware of our connection to Henrietta’s gift.”
—THE OREGONIAN
“This is the perfect book. It reads like a novel but has the intellectual substance
of a science textbook or a historical biography.”
—THE DAILY NEBRASKAN
“Illuminates what happens when medical research is conducted within an
unequal health-care system and delivers an American narrative fraught with
intrigue, tragedy, triumph, pathos, and redemption.”
—MS.
“A tremendous accomplishment—a tale of important science history that reads
like a terrific novel.”
—KANSAS CITY STAR, Best Book of the Year
“Stripped bare of scientific mind, of political and ideological counsel, of
celestial advisement and legal consideration, of professional belonging and
identity—I would have to say that the book tells a remarkably simple story
infused with a very old theme. In essence, the story is a fiercely human tale
about the importance of seeing one another in the clarifying light of each
other’s unique and radiant mortal being.”
—Kate Scannell, Journal of Legal Medicine
“Good science writing isn’t easy, but Skloot makes it appear so.”
—THE WICHITA EAGLE, Best Book of the Year
“Encompasses nearly every hot-button issue currently surrounding the practice
of medicine.”
—MADISON CAPITAL TIMES
“Defies easy categorization … as unpredictable as any pulp mystery and as
strange as any science fiction.”
—WILLAMETTE WEEK
“An achievement … navigates both the technical and deeply personal sides of
the HeLa story with clarity and care.”
—THE PORTLAND MERCURY
“[A] remarkable book.”
—LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
“An essential reminder that all human cells grown in labs across the world,
HeLa or otherwise, came from individuals with fears, desires, and stories to
tell.”
—CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS
“Blows away the notion that science writing must be the literary equivalent to
Ambien.”
—CHICAGO TRIBUNE
“Seldom do you read a book that is science, social history, and a page turner.”
—BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL
“Thrilling and original nonfiction that refuses to be shoehorned into anything as
trivial as a genre. It is equal parts popular science, historical biography, and
detective novel.”
—Ed Yong, DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
“Best book I’ve read in years.”
—Brian Sullivan, FOX BUSINESS NETWORK
“Thanks to Rebecca Skloot, we may now remember Henrietta—who she was,
how she lived, how she died.”
—THE NEW REPUBLIC
“But this book isn’t just about science; it’s about gender, race, and life itself.”
—TORONTO SUN
“We need more writers like Rebecca Skloot.”
—E.O. WILSON
For my family:
My parents, Betsy and Floyd; their spouses, Terry and Beverly;
my brother and sister-in-law, Matt and Renee;
and my wonderful nephews, Nick and Justin.
They all did without me for far too long because of this book,
but never stopped believing in it, or me.
And in loving memory of my grandfather,
James Robert Lee (1912–2003),
who treasured books more than anyone I’ve known.
Contents
Cover
Praise for Rebecca Skloot
Title Page
Dedication
A Few Words About This Book
Epigraph
Prologue: The Woman in the Photograph
Deborah’s Voice
Part One
LIFE
1. The Exam … 1951
2. Clover … 1920–1942
3. Diagnosis and Treatment … 1951
4. The Birth of HeLa … 1951
5. “Blackness Be Spreadin All Inside” … 1951
6. “Lady’s on the Phone” … 1999
7. The Death and Life of Cell Culture … 1951
8. “A Miserable Specimen” … 1951
9. Turner Station … 1999
10. The Other Side of the Tracks … 1999
11. “The Devil of Pain Itself” … 1951
Part Two
DEATH
12. The Storm … 1951
13. The HeLa Factory … 1951–1953
14. Helen Lane … 1953–1954
15. “Too Young to Remember” … 1951–1965
16. “Spending Eternity in the Same Place” … 1999
17. Illegal, Immoral, and Deplorable … 1954–1966
18. “Strangest Hybrid” … 1960–1966
19. “The Most Critical Time on This Earth Is Now” … 1966–1973
20. The HeLa Bomb … 1966
21. Night Doctors … 2000
22. “The Fame She So Richly Deserves” … 1970–1973
Part Three
IMMORTALITY
23. “It’s Alive” … 1973–1974
24. “Least They Can Do” … 1975
25. “Who Told You You Could Sell My Spleen?” … 1976–1988
26. Breach of Privacy … 1980–1985
Photo Insert
27. The Secret of Immortality … 1984–1995
28. After London … 1996–1999
29. A Village of Henriettas … 2000
30. Zakariyya … 2000
31. Hela, Goddess of Death … 2000–2001
32. “All That’s My Mother” … 2001
33. The Hospital for the Negro Insane … 2001
34. The Medical Records … 2001
35. Soul Cleansing … 2001
36. Heavenly Bodies … 2001
37. “Nothing to Be Scared About” … 2001
38. The Long Road to Clover … 2009
Where They Are Now
About the Henrietta Lacks Foundation
Afterword
Cast of Characters
Timeline
Acknowledgments
Notes
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
Copyright
A Few Words About This Book
This is a work of nonfiction. No names have been changed, no
characters invented, no events fabricated. While writing this book, I
conducted more than a thousand hours of interviews with family and
friends of Henrietta Lacks, as well as with lawyers, ethicists,
scientists, and journalists who’ve written about the Lacks family. I
also relied on extensive archival photos and documents, scientific and
historical research, and the personal journals of Henrietta’s daughter,
Deborah Lacks.
I’ve done my best to capture the language with which each person
spoke and wrote: dialogue appears in native dialects; passages from
diaries and other personal writings are quoted exactly as written. As
one of Henrietta’s relatives said to me, “If you pretty up how people
spoke and change the things they said, that’s dishonest. It’s taking
away their lives, their experiences, and their selves.” In many places
I’ve adopted the words interviewees used to describe their worlds and
experiences. In doing so, I’ve used the language of their times and
backgrounds, including words such as colored. Members of the Lacks
family often referred to Johns Hopkins as “John Hopkin,” and I’ve
kept their usage when they’re speaking. Anything written in the first
person in Deborah Lacks’s voice is a quote of her speaking, edited for
length and occasionally clarity.
Since Henrietta Lacks died decades before I began writing this
book, I relied on interviews, legal documents, and her medical
records to re-create scenes from her life. In those scenes, dialogue is
either deduced from the written record or quoted verbatim as it was
recounted to me in an interview. Whenever possible I conducted
multiple interviews with multiple sources to ensure accuracy. The
extract from Henrietta’s medical record in chapter 1 is a summary of
many disparate notations.
The word HeLa, used to refer to the cells grown from Henrietta
Lacks’s cervix, occurs throughout the book. It is pronounced hee-lah.
About chronology: Dates for scientific research refer to when the
research was conducted, not when it was published. In some cases
those dates are approximate because there is no record of exact start
dates. Also, because I move back and forth between multiple stories,
and scientific discoveries occur over many years, there are places in
the book where, for the sake of clarity, I describe scientific
discoveries sequentially, even though they took place during the same
general period of time.
The history of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells raises important
issues regarding science, ethics, race, and class; I’ve done my best to
present them clearly within the narrative of the Lacks story, and I’ve
included an afterword addressing the current legal and ethical debate
surrounding tissue ownership and research. There is much more to
say on all the issues, but that is beyond the scope of this book, so I
will leave it for scholars and experts in the field to address. I hope
readers will forgive any omissions.
We must not see any person as an abstraction.
Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets,
with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish,
and with some measure of triumph.
—ELIE WIESEL
from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code
PROLOGUE
The Woman in the Photograph
There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left
corner torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into
the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips
painted deep red. It’s the late 1940s and she hasn’t yet reached the
age of thirty. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and
playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her—a tumor that
would leave her five children motherless and change the future of
medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta
Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.”
No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of
times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory
walls. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no
name at all. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the
world’s first immortal human cells—her cells, cut from her cervix just
months before she died.
Her real name is Henrietta Lacks.
I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life
she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about
cells from her cervix living on forever—bought, sold, packaged, and
shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I’ve tried to
imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first
space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero
gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important
advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene
mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of
us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells
growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.
There’s no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta’s cells
are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa
cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million
metric tons—an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell
weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could
lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they’d wrap around the
Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. In her
prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall.
I first learned about HeLa cells and the woman behind them in
1988, thirty-seven years after her death, when I was sixteen and
sitting in a community college biology class. My instructor, Donald
Defler, a gnomish balding man, paced at the front of the lecture hall
and flipped on an overhead projector. He pointed to two diagrams
that appeared on the wall behind him. They were schematics of the
cell reproduction cycle, but to me they just looked like a neon-colored
mess of arrows, squares, and circles with words I didn’t understand,
like “MPF Triggering a Chain Reaction of Protein Activations.”
I was a kid who’d failed freshman year at the regular public high
school because she never showed up. I’d transferred to an alternative
school that offered dream studies instead of biology, so I was taking
Defler’s class for high-school credit, which meant that I was sitting in
a college lecture hall at sixteen with words like mitosis and kinase
inhibitors flying around. I was completely lost.
“Do we have to memorize everything on those diagrams?” one
student yelled.
Yes, Defler said, we had to memorize the diagrams, and yes, they’d
be on the test, but that didn’t matter right then. What he wanted us to
understand was that cells are amazing things: There are about one
hundred trillion of them in our bodies, each so small that several
thousand could fit on the period at the end of this sentence. They
make up all our tissues—muscle, bone, blood—which in turn make up
our organs.
Under the microscope, a cell looks a lot like a fried egg: It has a
white (the cytoplasm) that’s full of water and proteins to keep it fed,
and a yolk (the nucleus) that holds all the genetic information that
makes you you. The cytoplasm buzzes like a New York City street. It’s
crammed full of molecules and vessels endlessly shuttling enzymes
and sugars from one part of the cell to another, pumping water,
nutrients, and oxygen in and out of the cell. All the while, little
cytoplasmic factories work 24/7, cranking out sugars, fats, proteins,
and energy to keep the whole thing running and feed the nucleus—
the brains of the operation. Inside every nucleus within each cell in
your body, there’s an identical copy of your entire genome. That
genome tells cells when to grow and divide and makes sure they do
their jobs, whether that’s controlling your heartbeat or helping your
brain understand the words on this page.
Defler paced the front of the classroom telling us how mitosis—the
process of cell division—makes it possible for embryos to grow into
babies, and for our bodies to create new cells for healing wounds or
replenishing blood we’ve lost. It was beautiful, he said, like a
perfectly choreographed dance.
All it takes is one small mistake anywhere in the division process
for cells to start growing out of control, he told us. Just one enzyme
misfiring, just one wrong protein activation, and you could have
cancer. Mitosis goes haywire, which is how it spreads.
“We learned that by studying cancer cells in culture,” Defler said.
He grinned and spun to face the board, where he wrote two words in
enormous print: HENRIETTA LACKS.
Henrietta died in 1951 from a vicious case of cervical cancer, he
told us. But before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and
put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human
cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died.
Henrietta’s were different: 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.
“Henrietta’s cells have now been living outside her body far longer
than they ever lived inside it,” Defler said. If we went to almost any
cell culture lab in the world and opened its freezers, he told us, we’d
probably find millions—if not billions—of Henrietta’s cells in small
vials on ice.
Her cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and
those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes,
leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease; and they’ve
been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases,
appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative
cellular effects of working in sewers. Their chromosomes and proteins
have been studied with such detail and precision that scientists know
their every quirk. Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta’s cells have
become the standard laboratory workhorse.
“HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to
medicine in the last hundred years,” Defler said.
Then, matter-of-factly, almost as an afterthought, he said, “She was
a black woman.” He erased her name in one fast swipe and blew the
chalk from his hands. Class was over.
As the other students filed out of the room, I sat thinking, That’s it?
That’s all we get? There has to be more to the story.
I followed Defler to his office.
“Where was she from?” I asked. “Did she know how important her
cells were? Did she have any children?”
“I wish I could tell you,” he said, “but no one knows anything
about her.”
After class, I ran home and threw myself onto my bed with my
biology textbook. I looked up “cell culture” in the index, and there
she was, a small parenthetical:
In culture, cancer cells can go on dividing indefinitely, if they have a continual
supply of nutrients, and thus are said to be “immortal.” A striking example is a
cell line that has been reproducing in culture since 1951. (Cells of this line are
called HeLa cells because their original source was a tumor removed from a
woman named Henrietta Lacks.)
That was it. I looked up HeLa in my parents’ encyclopedia, then my
dictionary: No Henrietta.
As I graduated from high school and worked my way through
college toward a biology degree, HeLa cells were omnipresent. I
heard about them in histology, neurology, pathology; I used them in
experiments on how neighboring cells communicate. But after Mr.
Defler, no one mentioned Henrietta.
When I got my first computer in the mid-nineties and started using
the Internet, I searched for information about her, but found only
confused snippets: most sites said her name was Helen Lane; some
said she died in the thirties; others said the forties, fifties, or even
sixties. Some said ovarian cancer killed her, others said breast or
cervical cancer.
Eventually I tracked down a few magazine articles about her from
the seventies. Ebony quoted Henrietta’s husband saying, “All I
remember is that she had this disease, and right after she died they
called me in the office wanting to get my permission to take a sample
of some kind. I decided not to let them.” Jet said the family was angry
—angry that Henrietta’s cells were being sold for twenty-five dollars a
vial, and angry that articles had been published about the cells
without their knowledge. It said, “Pounding in the back of their heads
was a gnawing feeling that science and the press had taken advantage
of them.”
The articles all ran photos of Henrietta’s family: her oldest son
sitting at his dining room table in Baltimore, looking at a genetics
textbook. Her middle son in military uniform, smiling and holding a
baby. But one picture stood out more than any other: in it, Henrietta’s
daughter, Deborah Lacks, is surrounded by family, everyone smiling,
arms around each other, eyes bright and excited. Except Deborah. She
stands in the foreground looking alone, almost as if someone pasted
her into the photo after the fact. She’s twenty-six years old and
beautiful, with short brown hair and catlike eyes. But those eyes glare
at the camera, hard and serious. The caption said the family had
found out just a few months earlier that Henrietta’s cells were still
alive, yet at that point she’d been dead for twenty-five years.
All of the stories mentioned that scientists had begun doing
research on Henrietta’s children, but the Lackses didn’t seem to know
what that research was for. They said they were being tested to see if
they had the cancer that killed Henrietta, but according to the
reporters, scientists were studying the Lacks family to learn more
about Henrietta’s cells. The stories quoted her son Lawrence, who
wanted to know if the immortality of his mother’s cells meant that he
might live forever too. But one member of the family remained
voiceless: Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah.
As I worked my way through graduate school studying writing, I
became fixated on the idea of someday telling Henrietta’s story. At
one point I even called directory assistance in Baltimore looking for
Henrietta’s husband, David Lacks, but he wasn’t listed. I had the idea
that I’d write a book that was a biography of both the cells and the
woman they came from—someone’s daughter, wife, and mother.
I couldn’t have imagined it then, but that phone call would mark
the beginning of a decadelong adventure through scientific
laboratories, hospitals, and mental institutions, with a cast of
characters that would include Nobel laureates, grocery store clerks,
convicted felons, and a professional con artist. While trying to make
sense of the history of cell culture and the complicated ethical debate
surrounding the use of human tissues in research, I’d be accused of
conspiracy and slammed into a wall both physically and
metaphorically, and I’d eventually find myself on the receiving end of
something that looked a lot like an exorcism. I did eventually meet
Deborah, who would turn out to be one of the strongest and most
resilient women I’d ever known. We’d form a deep personal bond, and
slowly, without realizing it, I’d become a character in her story, and
she in mine.
Deborah and I came from very different cultures: I grew up white
and agnostic in the Pacific Northwest, my roots half New York Jew
and half Midwestern Protestant; Deborah was a deeply religious black
Christian from the South. I tended to leave the room when religion
came up in conversation because it made me uncomfortable;
Deborah’s family tended toward preaching, faith healings, and
sometimes voo doo. She grew up in a black neighborhood that was
one of the poorest and most dangerous in the country; I grew up in a
safe, quiet middle-class neighborhood in a predominantly white city
and went to high school with a total of two black students. I was a
science journalist who referred to all things supernatural as “woo-woo
stuff;” Deborah believed Henrietta’s spirit lived on in her cells,
controlling the life of anyone who crossed its path. Including me.
“How else do you explain why your science teacher knew her real
name when everyone else called her Helen Lane?” Deborah would
say. “She was trying to get your attention.” This thinking would apply
to everything in my life: when I married while writing this book, it
was because Henrietta wanted someone to take care of me while I
worked. When I divorced, it was because she’d decided he was getting
in the way of the book. When an editor who insisted I take the Lacks
family out of the book was injured in a mysterious accident, Deborah
said that’s what happens when you piss Henrietta off.
The Lackses challenged everything I thought I knew about faith,
science, journalism, and race. Ultimately, this book is the result. It’s
not only the story of HeLa cells and Henrietta Lacks, but of
Henrietta’s family—particularly Deborah—and their lifelong struggle
to make peace with the existence of those cells, and the science that
made them possible.
DEBORAH’S VOICE
When people ask—and seems like people always be askin to where I can’t
never get away from it—I say, Yeah, that’s right, my mother name was
Henrietta Lacks, she died in 1951, John Hopkins took her cells and them
cells are still livin today, still multiplyin, still growin and spreadin if you
don’t keep em frozen. Science calls her HeLa and she’s all over the world
in medical facilities, in all the computers and the Internet everywhere.
When I go to the doctor for my checkups I always say my mother was
HeLa. They get all excited, tell me stuff like how her cells helped make my
blood pressure medicines and antidepression pills and how all this
important stuff in science happen cause of her. But they don’t never
explain more than just sayin, Yeah, your mother was on the moon, she
been in nuclear bombs and made that polio vaccine. I really don’t know
how she did all that, but I guess I’m glad she did, cause that mean she
helpin lots of people. I think she would like that.
But I always have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much
for medicine, how come her family can’t afford to see no doctors? Don’t
make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin
about them takin her cells, now we don’t get a dime. I used to get so mad
about that to where it made me sick and I had to take pills. But I don’t got
it in me no more to fight. I just want to know who my mother was.
1
The Exam
On January 29, 1951, David Lacks sat behind the wheel of his old
Buick, watching the rain fall. He was parked under a towering oak
tree outside Johns Hopkins Hospital with three of his children—two
still in diapers—waiting for their mother, Henrietta. A few minutes
earlier she’d jumped out of the car, pulled her jacket over her head,
and scurried into the hospital, past the “colored” bathroom, the only
one she was allowed to use. In the next building, under an elegant
domed copper roof, a ten-and-a-half-foot marble statue of Jesus stood,
arms spread wide, holding court over what was once the main
entrance of Hopkins. No one in Henrietta’s family ever saw a Hopkins
doctor without visiting the Jesus statue, laying flowers at his feet,
saying a prayer, and rubbing his big toe for good luck. But that day
Henrietta didn’t stop.
She went straight to the waiting room of the gynecology clinic, a
wide-open space, empty but for rows of long straight-backed benches
that looked like church pews.
“I got a knot on my womb,” she told the receptionist. “The doctor
need to have a look.”
For more than a year Henrietta had been telling her closest
girlfriends something didn’t feel right. One night after dinner, she sat
on her bed with her cousins Margaret and Sadie and told them, “I got
a knot inside me.”
“A what?” Sadie asked.
“A knot,” she said. “It hurt somethin awful—when that man want
to get with me, Sweet Jesus aren’t them but some pains.”
When sex first started hurting, she thought it had something to do
with baby Deborah, who she’d just given birth to a few weeks earlier,
or the bad blood David sometimes brought home after nights with
other women—the kind doctors treated with shots of penicillin and
heavy metals.
Henrietta grabbed her cousins’ hands one at a time and guided
them to her belly, just as she’d done when Deborah started kicking.
“You feel anything?”
The cousins pressed their fingers into her stomach again and again.
“I don’t know,” Sadie said. “Maybe you’re pregnant outside your
womb—you know that can happen.”
“I’m no kind of pregnant,” Henrietta said. “It’s a knot.”
“Hennie, you gotta check that out. What if it’s somethin bad?”
But Henrietta didn’t go to the doctor, and the cousins didn’t tell
anyone what she’d said in the bedroom. In those days, people didn’t
talk about things like cancer, but Sadie always figured Henrietta kept
it secret because she was afraid a doctor would take her womb and
make her stop having children.
About a week after telling her cousins she thought something was
wrong, at the age of twenty-nine, Henrietta turned up pregnant with
Joe, her fifth child. Sadie and Margaret told Henrietta that the pain
probably had something to do with a baby after all. But Henrietta still
said no.
“It was there before the baby,” she told them. “It’s somethin else.”
They all stopped talking about the knot, and no one told Henrietta’s
husband anything about it. Then, four and a half months after baby
Joseph was born, Henrietta went to the bathroom and found blood
spotting her underwear when it wasn’t her time of the month.
She filled her bathtub, lowered herself into the warm water, and
spread her legs. With the door closed to her children, husband, and
cousins, Henrietta slid a finger inside herself and rubbed it across her
cervix until she found what she somehow knew she’d find: a hard
lump, deep inside, as though someone had lodged a marble just to the
left of the opening to her womb.
Henrietta climbed out of the bathtub, dried herself off, and dressed.
Then she told her husband, “You better take me to the doctor. I’m
bleedin and it ain’t my time.”
Her local doctor took one look inside her, saw the lump, and
figured it was a sore from syphilis. But the lump tested negative for
syphilis, so he told Henrietta she’d better go to the Johns Hopkins
gynecology clinic.
Hopkins was one of the top hospitals in the country. It was built in
1889 as a charity hospital for the sick and poor, and it covered more
than a dozen acres where a cemetery and insane asylum once sat in
East Baltimore. The public wards at Hopkins were filled with patients,
most of them black and unable to pay their medical bills. David drove
Henrietta nearly twenty miles to get there, not because they preferred
it, but because it was the only major hospital for miles that treated
black patients. This was the era of Jim Crow—when black people
showed up at white-only hospitals, the staff was likely to send them
away, even if it meant they might die in the parking lot. Even
Hopkins, which did treat black patients, segregated them in colored
wards, and had colored-only fountains.
So when the nurse called Henrietta from the waiting room, she led
her through a single door to a colored-only exam room—one in a long
row of rooms divided by clear glass walls that let nurses see from one
to the next. Henrietta undressed, wrapped herself in a starched white
hospital gown, and lay down on a wooden exam table, waiting for
Howard Jones, the gynecologist on duty. Jones was thin and graying,
his deep voice softened by a faint Southern accent. When he walked
into the room, Henrietta told him about the lump. Before examining
her, he flipped through her chart—a quick sketch of her life, and a
litany of untreated conditions:
Sixth or seventh grade education; housewife and mother of five. Breathing
difficult since childhood due to recurrent throat infections and deviated septum
in patient’s nose. Physician recommended surgical repair. Patient declined.
Patient had one toothache for nearly five years; tooth eventually extracted with
several others. Only anxiety is oldest daughter who is epileptic and can’t talk.
Happy household. Very occasional drinker. Has not traveled. Well nourished,
cooperative. Patient was one of ten siblings. One died of car accident, one from
rheumatic heart, one was poisoned. Unexplained vaginal bleeding and blood in
urine during last two pregnancies; physician recommended sickle cell test.
Patient declined. Been with husband since age 15 and has no liking for sexual
intercourse. Patient has asymptomatic neuro syphilis but cancelled syphilis
treatments, said she felt fine. Two months prior to current visit, after delivery of
fifth child, patient had significant blood in urine. Tests showed areas of
increased cellular activity in the cervix. Physician recommended diagnostics
and referred to specialist for ruling out infection or cancer. Patient canceled
appointment. One month prior to current visit, patient tested positive for
gonorrhea. Patient recalled to clinic for treatment. No response.
It was no surprise that she hadn’t come back all those times for
follow-up. For Henrietta, walking into Hopkins was like entering a
foreign country where she didn’t speak the language. She knew about
harvesting tobacco and butchering a pig, but she’d never heard the
words cervix or biopsy. She didn’t read or write much, and she hadn’t
studied science in school. She, like most black patients, only went to
Hopkins when she thought she had no choice.
Jones listened as Henrietta told him about the pain, the blood. “She
says that she knew there was something wrong with the neck of her
womb,” he wrote later. “When asked why she knew it, she said that
she felt as if there were a lump there. I do not quite know what she
means by this, unless she actually palpated this area.”
Henrietta lay back on the table, feet pressed hard in stirrups as she
stared at the ceiling. And sure enough, Jones found a lump exactly
where she’d said he would. He described it as an eroded, hard mass
about the size of a nickel. If her cervix was a clock’s face, the lump
was at four o’clock. He’d seen easily a thousand cervical cancer
lesions, but never anything like this: shiny and purple (like “grape
Jello,” he wrote later), and so delicate it bled at the slightest touch.
Jones cut a small sample and sent it to the pathology lab down the
hall for a diagnosis. Then he told Henrietta to go home.
Soon after, Jones sat down and dictated notes about Henrietta and
her diagnosis: “Her history is interesting in that she had a term
delivery here at this hospital, September 19, 1950,” he said. “No note
is made in the history at that time, or at the six weeks’ return visit
that there is any abnormality of the cervix.”
Yet here she was, three months later, with a full-fledged tumor.
Either her doctors had missed it during her last exams—which
seemed impossible—or it had grown at a terrifying rate.
2
Clover
Henrietta Lacks was born Loretta Pleasant in Roanoke, Virginia, on
August 1, 1920. No one knows how she became Henrietta. A midwife
named Fannie delivered her into a small shack on a dead-end road
overlooking a train depot, where hundreds of freight cars came and
went each day. Henrietta shared that house with her parents and
eight older siblings until 1924, when her mother, Eliza Lacks
Pleasant, died giving birth to her tenth child.
Henrietta’s father, Johnny Pleasant, was a squat man who hobbled
around on a cane he often hit people with. Family lore has it that he
killed his own brother for trying to get fresh with Eliza. Johnny didn’t
have the patience for raising children, so when Eliza died, he took
them all back to Clover, Virginia, where his family still farmed the
tobacco fields their ancestors had worked as slaves. No one in Clover
could take all ten children, so relatives divided them up—one with
this cousin, one with that aunt. Henrietta ended up with her
grandfather, Tommy Lacks.
Tommy lived in what everyone called the home-house—a fourroom log cabin that once served as slave quarters, with plank floors,
gas lanterns, and water Henrietta hauled up a long hill from the
creek. The home-house stood on a hillside where wind whipped
through cracks in the walls. The air inside stayed so cool that when
relatives died, the family kept their corpses in the front hallway for
days so people could visit and pay respects. Then they buried them in
the cemetery out back.
Henrietta’s grandfather was already raising another grandchild that
one of his daughters had left behind after delivering him on the
home-house floor. That child’s name was David Lacks, but everyone
called him Day, because in the Lacks country drawl, house sounds
like hyse, and David sounds like Day.
Young Day was what the Lacks family called a sneak baby: a man
named Johnny Coleman had passed through town; nine months later
Day arrived. A twelve-year-old cousin and midwife named Munchie
delivered him, blue as a stormy sky and not breathing. A white doctor
came to the home-house with his derby and walking stick, wrote
“stillborn” on Day’s birth certificate, then drove his horse-drawn
buggy back to town, leaving a cloud of red dust behind.
Munchie prayed as he rode away, Lord, I know you didn’t mean to
take this baby. She washed Day in a tub of warm water, then put him
on a white sheet where she rubbed and patted his chest until he
gasped for breath and his blue skin warmed to soft brown.
By the time Johnny Pleasant shipped Henrietta off to live with
Grandpa Tommy, she was four and Day was almost nine. No one
could have guessed she’d spend the rest of her life with Day—first as
a cousin growing up in their grandfather’s home, then as his wife.
As children, Henrietta and Day awoke each morning at four o’clock
to milk the cows and feed the chickens, hogs, and horses. They tended
a garden filled with corn, peanuts, and greens, then headed to the
tobacco fields with their cousins Cliff, Fred, Sadie, Margaret, and a
horde of others. They spent much of their young lives stooped in
those fields, planting tobacco behind mule-drawn plows. Each harvest
they pulled the wide leaves from their stalks and tied them into small
bundles—their fingers raw and sticky with nicotine resin—then
climbed the rafters of their grandfather’s tobacco barn to hang bundle
after bundle for curing. Each summer day they prayed for a storm to
cool their skin from the burning sun. When they got one, they’d
scream and run through fields, snatching armfuls of ripe fruit and
walnuts that the winds blew from the trees.
Like most young Lackses, Day didn’t finish school: he stopped in
the fourth grade because the family needed him to work the fields.
But Henrietta stayed until the sixth grade. During the school year,
after taking care of the garden and livestock each morning, she’d
walk two miles—past the white school where children threw rocks
and taunted her—to the colored school, a three-room wooden
farmhouse hidden under tall shade trees, with a yard out front where
Mrs. Coleman made the boys and girls play on separate sides. When
school let out each day, and any time it wasn’t in session, Henrietta
was in the fields with Day and the cousins.
If the weather was nice, when they finished working, the cousins
ran straight to the swimming hole they made each year by damming
the creek behind the house with rocks, sticks, bags of sand, and
anything else they could sink. They threw rocks to scare away the
poisonous cottonmouth snakes, then dropped into the water from tree
branches or dove from muddy banks.
At nightfall they built fires with pieces of old shoes to keep the
mosquitoes away, and watched the stars from beneath the big oak
tree where they’d hung a rope to swing from. They played tag, ringaround-the-rosy, and hopscotch, and danced around the field singing
until Grandpa Tommy yelled for everyone to go to bed.
Each night, piles of cousins packed into the crawl space above a
little wooden kitchen house just a few feet from the home-house.
They lay one next to the other—telling stories about the headless
tobacco farmer who roamed the streets at night, or the man with no
eyes who lived by the creek—then slept until their grandmother
Chloe fired up the woodstove below and woke them to the smell of
fresh biscuits.
One evening each month during harvest season, Grandpa Tommy
hitched the horses after supper and readied them to ride into the
town of South Boston—home of the nation’s second-largest tobacco
market, with tobacco parades, a Miss Tobacco pageant, and a port
where boats collected the dried leaves for people around the world to
smoke.
Before leaving home, Tommy would call for the young cousins,
who’d nestle into the flat wagon on a bed of tobacco leaves, then fight
sleep as long as they could before giving in to the rhythm of the
horses. Like farmers from all over Virginia, Tommy Lacks and the
grandchildren rode through the night to bring their crops to South
Boston, where they’d line up at dawn—one wagon behind the next—
waiting for the enormous green wooden gates of the auction
warehouse to open.
When they arrived, Henrietta and the cousins would help unhitch
the horses and fill their troughs with grain, then unload the family’s
tobacco onto the wood-plank floor of the warehouse. The auctioneer
rattled off numbers that echoed through the huge open room, its
ceiling nearly thirty feet high and covered with skylights blackened
by years of dirt. As Tommy Lacks stood by his crop praying for a good
price, Henrietta and the cousins ran around the tobacco piles, talking
in a fast gibberish to sound like the auctioneer. At night they’d help
Tommy haul any unsold tobacco down to the basement, where he’d
turn the leaves into a bed for the children. White farmers slept
upstairs in lofts and private rooms; black farmers slept in the dark
underbelly of the warehouse with the horses, mules, and dogs, on a
dusty dirt floor lined with rows of wooden stalls for livestock, and
mountains of empty liquor bottles piled almost to the ceiling.
Night at the warehouse was a time of booze, gambling, prostitution,
and occasional murders as farmers burned through their season’s
earnings. From their bed of leaves, the Lacks children would stare at
ceiling beams the size of trees as they drifted off to the sound of
laughter and clanking bottles, and the smell of dried tobacco.
In the morning they’d pile into the wagon with their unsold harvest
and set out on the long journey home. Any cousins who’d stayed
behind in Clover knew a wagon ride into South Boston meant treats
for everyone—a hunk of cheese, maybe, or a slab of bologna—so they
waited for hours on Main Street to follow the wagon to the homehouse.
Clover’s wide, dusty Main Street was full of Model As, and wagons
pulled by mules and horses. Old Man Snow had the first tractor in
town, and he drove it to the store like it was a car—newspaper tucked
under his arm, his hounds Cadillac and Dan baying beside him. Main
Street had a movie theater, bank, jewelry store, doctor’s office,
hardware store, and several churches. When the weather was good,
white men with suspenders, top hats, and long cigars—everyone from
mayor to doctor to undertaker—stood along Main Street sipping
whiskey from juice bottles, talking, or playing checkers on the
wooden barrel in front of the pharmacy. Their wives gossiped at the
general store as their babies slept in a row on the counter, heads
resting on long bolts of fabric.
Henrietta and her cousins would hire themselves out to those white
folks, pulling their tobacco for ten cents so they’d have money to see
their favorite Buck Jones cowboy movies. The theater owner showed
silent black-and-white films, and his wife played along on the piano.
She knew only one song, so she played happy carnival-style music for
every scene, even when characters were getting shot and dying. The
Lacks children sat up in the colored section next to the projector,
which clicked like a metronome through the whole movie.
As Henrietta and Day grew older, they traded ring-around-the-
rosy for horse races along the dirt road that ran the length of what
used to be the Lacks tobacco plantation, but was now simply called
Lacks Town. The boys always fought over who got to ride Charlie
Horse, Grandpa Tommy’s tall bay, which could outrun any other
horse in Clover. Henrietta and the other girls watched from the
hillside or the backs of straw-filled wagons, hopping up and down,
clapping and screaming as the boys streaked by on horseback.
Henrietta often yelled for Day, but sometimes she cheered for
another cousin, Crazy Joe Grinnan. Crazy Joe was what their cousin
Cliff called “an over average man”—tall, husky, and strong, with dark
skin, a sharp nose, and so much thick black hair covering his head,
arms, back, and neck that he had to shave his whole body in the
summer to keep from burning up. They called him Crazy Joe because
he was so in love with Henrietta, he’d do anything to get her
attention. She was the prettiest girl in Lacks Town, with her beautiful
smile and walnut eyes.
The first time Crazy Joe tried to kill himself over Henrietta, he ran
circles around her in the middle of winter while she was on her way
home from school. He begged her for a date, saying, “Hennie, come
on … just give me a chance.” When she laughed and said no, Crazy
Joe ran and jumped straight through the ice of a frozen pond and
refused to come out until she agreed to go out with him.
All the cousins teased Joe, saying, “Maybe he thought that ice
water might’a cool him off, but he so hot for her, that water nearly
started boiling!” Henrietta’s cousin Sadie, who was Crazy Joe’s sister,
yelled at him, “Man you so much in love with a girl, you gonna die
for her? That ain’t right.”
No one knew what happened between Henrietta and Crazy Joe,
except that there were some dates and some kisses. But Henrietta and
Day had been sharing a bedroom since she was four, so what
happened next didn’t surprise anyone: they started having children
together. Their son Lawrence was born just months after Henrietta’s
fourteenth birthday; his sister Lucile Elsie Pleasant came along four
years later. They were both born on the floor of the home-house like
their father, grandmother, and grandfather before them.
People wouldn’t use words like epilepsy, mental retardation, or
neurosyphilis to describe Elsie’s condition until years later. To the folks
in Lacks Town, she was just simple. Touched. She came into the
world so fast, Day hadn’t even gotten back with the midwife when
Elsie shot right out and hit her head on the floor. Everyone would say
maybe that was what left her mind like an infant’s.
The old dusty record books from Henrietta’s church are filled with
the names of women cast from the congregation for bearing children
out of wedlock, but for some reason Henrietta never was, even as
rumors floated around Lacks Town that maybe Crazy Joe had
fathered one of her children.
When Crazy Joe found out Henrietta was going to marry Day, he
stabbed himself in the chest with an old dull pocketknife. His father
found him lying drunk in their yard, shirt soaked with blood. He tried
to stop the bleeding, but Joe fought him—thrashing and punching—
which just made him bleed more. Eventually Joe’s father wrestled
him into the car, tied him tight to the door, and drove to the doctor.
When Joe got home all bandaged up, Sadie just kept saying, “All that
to stop Hennie from marrying Day?” But Crazy Joe wasn’t the only
one trying to stop the marriage.
Henrietta’s sister Gladys was always saying Henrietta could do
better. When most Lackses talked about Henrietta and Day and their
early life in Clover, it sounded as idyllic as a fairy tale. But not
Gladys. No one knew why she was so against the marriage. Some
folks said Gladys was just jealous because Henrietta was prettier. But
Gladys always insisted Day would be a no-good husband.
Henrietta and Day married alone at their preacher’s house on April
10, 1941. She was twenty; he was twenty-five. They didn’t go on a
honeymoon because there was too much work to do, and no money
for travel. By winter, the United States was at war and tobacco
companies were supplying free cigarettes to soldiers, so the market
was booming. But as large farms flourished, the small ones struggled.
Henrietta and Day were lucky if they sold enough tobacco each
season to feed the family and plant the next crop.
So after their wedding, Day went back to gripping the splintered
ends of his old wooden plow as Henrietta followed close behind,
pushing a homemade wheelbarrow and dropping tobacco seedlings
into holes in the freshly turned red dirt.
Then one afternoon at the end of 1941, their cousin Fred Garret
came barreling down the dirt road beside their field. He was just back
from Baltimore for a visit in his slick ‘36 Chevy and fancy clothes.
Only a year earlier, Fred and his brother Cliff had been tobacco
farmers in Clover too. For extra money, they’d opened a “colored”
convenience store where most customers paid in IOUs; they also ran
an old cinderblock juke joint where Henrietta often danced on the
red-dirt floor. Everybody put coins in the jukebox and drank RC Cola,
but the profits never amounted to much. So eventually Fred took his
last three dollars and twenty-five cents and bought a bus ticket north
for a new life. He, like several other cousins, went to work at
Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point steel mill and live in Turner Station,
a small community of black workers on a peninsula in the Patapsco
River, about twenty miles from downtown Baltimore.
In the late 1800s, when Sparrows Point first opened, Turner Station
was mostly swamps, farmland, and a few shanties connected with
wooden boards for walkways. When demand for steel increased
during World War I, streams of white workers moved into the nearby
town of Dundalk, and Bethlehem Steel’s housing barracks for black
workers quickly overflowed, pushing them into Turner Station. By the
early years of World War II, Turner Station had a few paved roads, a
doctor, a general store, and an ice man. But its residents were still
fighting for water, sewage lines, and schools.
Then, in December 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and it was
like Turner Station had won the lottery: the demand for steel
skyrocketed, as did the need for workers. The government poured
money into Turner Station, which began filling with one-and twostory housing projects, many of them pressed side by side and backto-back, some with four to five hundred units. Most were brick, others
covered with asbestos shingles. Some had yards, some didn’t. From
most of them you could see the flames dancing above Sparrows
Point’s furnaces and the eerie red smoke pouring from its
smokestacks.
Sparrows Point was rapidly becoming the largest steel plant in the
world. It produced concrete-reinforcing bars, barbed wire, nails, and
steel for cars, refrigerators, and military ships. It would burn more
than six million tons of coal each year to make up to eight million
tons of steel and employ more than 30,000 workers. Bethlehem Steel
was a gold mine in a time flush with poverty, especially for black
families from the South. Word spread from Maryland to the farms of
Virginia and the Carolinas, and as part of what would become known
as the Great Migration, black families flocked from the South to
Turner Station—the Promised Land.
The work was tough, especially for black men, who got the jobs
white men wouldn’t touch. Like Fred, black workers usually started in
the bowels of partially built tankers in the shipyard, collecting bolts,
rivets, and nuts as they fell from the hands of men drilling and
welding thirty or forty feet up. Eventually black workers moved up to
the boiler room, where they shoveled coal into a blazing furnace.
They spent their days breathing in toxic coal dust and asbestos, which
they brought home to their wives and daughters, who inhaled it while
shaking the men’s clothes out for the wash. The black workers at
Sparrows Point made about eighty cents an hour at most, usually less.
White workers got higher wages, but Fred didn’t complain: eighty
cents an hour was more than most Lackses had ever seen.
Fred had made it. Now he’d come back to Clover to convince
Henrietta and Day that they should do the same. The morning after
he came barreling into town, Fred bought Day a bus ticket to
Baltimore. They agreed Henrietta would stay behind to care for the
children and the tobacco until Day made enough for a house of their
own in Baltimore, and three tickets north. A few months later, Fred
got a draft notice shipping him overseas. Before he left, Fred gave
Day all the money he’d saved, saying it was time to get Henrietta and
the children to Turner Station.
Soon, with a child on each side, Henrietta boarded a coal-fueled
train from the small wooden depot at the end of Clover’s Main Street.
She left the tobacco fields of her youth and the hundred-year-old oak
tree that shaded her from the sun on so many hot afternoons. At the
age of twenty-one, Henrietta stared through the train window at
rolling hills and wide-open bodies of water for the first time, heading
toward a new life.
3
Diagnosis and Treatment
After her visit to Hopkins, Henrietta went about life as usual,
cleaning and cooking for Day, their children, and the many cousins
who stopped by. Then, a few days later, Jones got her biopsy results
from the pathology lab: “Epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, Stage
I.”
All cancers originate from a single cell gone wrong and are
categorized based on the type of cell they start from. Most cervical
cancers are carcinomas, which grow from the epithelial cells that
cover the cervix and protect its surface. By chance, when Henrietta
showed up at Hopkins complaining of abnormal bleeding, Jones and
his boss, Richard Wesley TeLinde, were involved in a heated
nationwide debate over what qualified as cervical cancer, and how
best to treat it.
TeLinde, one of the top cervical cancer experts in the country, was
a dapper and serious fifty-six-year-old surgeon who walked with an
extreme limp from an ice-skating accident more than a decade earlier.
Everyone at Hopkins called him Uncle Dick. He’d pioneered the use of
estrogen for treating symptoms of menopause and made important
early discoveries about endometriosis. He’d also written one of the
most famous clinical gynecology textbooks, which is still widely used
sixty years and ten editions after he first wrote it. His reputation was
international: when the king of Morocco’s wife fell ill, he insisted only
TeLinde could operate on her. By 1951, when Henrietta arrived at
Hopkins, TeLinde had developed a theory about cervical cancer that,
if correct, could save the lives of millions of women. But few in the
field believed him.
Cervical carcinomas are divided into two types: invasive
carcinomas, which have penetrated the surface of the cervix, and
noninvasive carcinomas, which haven’t. The noninvasive type is
sometimes called “sugar-icing carcinoma,” because it grows in a
smooth layered sheet across the surface of the cervix, but its official
name is carcinoma in situ, which derives from the Latin for “cancer in
its original place.”
In 1951, most doctors in the field believed that invasive carcinoma
was deadly, and carcinoma in situ wasn’t. So they treated the invasive
type aggressively but generally didn’t worry about carcinoma in situ
because they thought it couldn’t spread. TeLinde disagreed—he
believed carcinoma in situ was simply an early stage of invasive
carcinoma that, if left untreated, eventually became deadly. So he
treated it aggressively, often removing the cervix, uterus, and most of
the vagina. He argued that this would drastically reduce cervical
cancer deaths, but his critics called it extreme and unnecessary.
Diagnosing carcinoma in situ had only been possible since 1941,
when George Papanicolaou, a Greek researcher, published a paper
describing a test he’d developed, now called the Pap smear. It
involved scraping cells from the cervix with a curved glass pipette
and examining them under a microscope for precancerous changes
that TeLinde and a few others had identified years earlier. This was a
tremendous advance, because those precancerous cells weren’t
detectable otherwise: they caused no physical symptoms and weren’t
palpable or visible to the naked eye. By the time a woman began
showing symptoms, there was little hope of a cure. But with the Pap
smear, doctors could detect precancerous cells and perform a
hysterectomy, and cervical cancer would be almost entirely
preventable.
At that point, more than 15,000 women were dying each year from
cervical cancer. The Pap smear had the potential to decrease that
death rate by 70 percent or more, but there were two things standing
in its way: first, many women—like Henrietta—simply didn’t get the
test; and, second, even when they did, few doctors knew how to
interpret the results accurately, because they didn’t know what the
various stages of cervical cancer looked like under a microscope.
Some mistook cervical infections for cancer and removed a woman’s
entire reproductive tract when all she needed was antibiotics. Others
mistook malignant changes for infection, sending women home with
antibiotics only to have them return later, dying from metastasized
cancer. And even when doctors correctly diagnosed precancerous
changes, they often didn’t know how those changes should be treated.
TeLinde set out to minimize what he called “unjustifiable
hysterectomies” by documenting what wasn’t cervical cancer and by
urging surgeons to verify smear results with biopsies before
operating. He also hoped to prove that women with carcinoma in situ
needed aggressive treatment, so their cancer didn’t become invasive.
Not long before Henrietta’s first exam, TeLinde presented his
argument about carcinoma in situ to a major meeting of pathologists
in Washington, D.C., and the audience heckled him off the stage. So
he went back to Hopkins and planned a study that would prove them
wrong: he and his staff would review all medical records and biopsies
from patients who’d been diagnosed with invasive cervical cancer at
Hopkins in the past decade, to see how many initially had carcinoma
in situ.
Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the
public wards for research, usually without their knowledge. Many
scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in the
public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of
payment. And as Howard Jones once wrote, “Hopkins, with its large
indigent black population, had no dearth of clinical material.”
In this particular study—the largest ever done on the relationship
between the two cervical cancers—Jones and TeLinde found that 62
percent of women with invasive cancer who’d had earlier biopsies
first had carcinoma in situ. In addition to that study, TeLinde thought,
if he could find a way to grow living samples from normal cervical
tissue and both types of cancerous tissue—something never done
before—he could compare all three. If he could prove that carcinoma
in situ and invasive carcinoma looked and behaved similarly in the
laboratory, he could end the debate, showing that he’d been right all
along, and doctors who ignored him were killing their patients. So he
called George Gey (pronounced Guy), head of tissue culture research
at Hopkins.
Gey and his wife, Margaret, had spent the last three decades
working to grow malignant cells outside the body, hoping to use them
to find cancer’s cause and cure. But most cells died quickly, and the
few that survived hardly grew at all. The Geys were determined to
grow the first immortal human cells: a continuously dividing line of
cells all descended from one original sample, cells that would
constantly replenish themselves and never die. Eight years earlier—in
1943—a group of researchers at the National Institutes of Health had
proven such a thing was possible using mouse cells. The Geys wanted
to grow the human equivalent—they didn’t care what kind of tissue
they used, as long as it came from a person.
Gey took any cells he could get his hands on—he called himself
“the world’s most famous vulture, feeding on human specimens
almost constantly.” So when TeLinde offered him a supply of cervical
cancer tissue in exchange for trying to grow some cells, Gey didn’t
hesitate. And TeLinde began collecting samples from any woman who
happened to walk into Hopkins with cervical cancer. Including
Henrietta.
On February 5, 1951, after Jones got Henrietta’s biopsy report
back from the lab, he called and told her it was malignant. Henrietta
didn’t tell anyone what Jones said, and no one asked. She simply
went on with her day as if nothing had happened, which was just like
her—no sense upsetting anyone over something she could deal with
herself.
That night Henrietta told her husband, “Day, I need to go back to
the doctor tomorrow. He wants to do some tests, give me some
medicine.” The next morning she climbed from the Buick outside
Hopkins again, telling Day and the children not to worry.
“Ain’t nothin serious wrong,” she said. “Doctor’s gonna fix me right
up.”
Henrietta went straight to the admissions desk and told the
receptionist she was there for her treatment. Then she signed a form
with the words OPERATION PERMIT at the top of the page. It said:
I hereby give consent to the staff of The Johns Hopkins Hospital to perform any
operative procedures and under any anaesthetic either local or general that
they may deem necessary in the proper surgical care and treatment of:
______________________________
Henrietta printed her name in the blank space. A witness with
illegible handwriting signed a line at the bottom of the form, and
Henrietta signed another.
Then she followed a nurse down a long hallway into the ward for
colored women, where Howard Jones and several other white
physicians ran more tests than she’d had in her entire life. They
checked her urine, her blood, her lungs. They stuck tubes in her
bladder and nose.
On her second night at the hospital, the nurse on duty fed Henrietta
an early dinner so her stomach would be empty the next morning,
when a doctor put her under anesthetic for her first cancer treatment.
Henrietta’s tumor was the invasive type, and like hospitals
nationwide, Hopkins treated all invasive cervical carcinomas with
radium, a white radioactive metal that glows an eerie blue.
When radium was first discovered in the late 1800s, headlines
nationwide hailed it as “a substitute for gas, electricity, and a positive
cure for every disease.” Watchmakers added it to paint to make watch
dials glow, and doctors administered it in powdered form to treat
everything from seasickness to ear infections. But radium destroys
any cells it encounters, and patients who’d taken it for trivial
problems began dying. Radium causes mutations that can turn into
cancer, and at high doses it can burn the skin off a person’s body. But
it also kills cancer cells.
Hopkins had been using radium to treat cervical cancer since the
early 1900s, when a surgeon named Howard Kelly visited Marie and
Pierre Curie, the couple in France who’d discovered radium and its
ability to destroy cancer cells. Without realizing the danger of contact
with radium, Kelly brought some back to the United States in his
pockets and regularly traveled the world collecting more. By the
1940s, several studies—one of them conducted by Howard Jones,
Henrietta’s physician—showed that radium was safer and more
effective than surgery for treating invasive cervical cancer.
The morning of Henrietta’s first treatment, a taxi driver picked up a
doctor’s bag filled with thin glass tubes of radium from a clinic across
town. The tubes were tucked into individual slots inside small canvas
pouches hand-sewn by a local Baltimore woman. The pouches were
called Brack plaques, after the Hopkins doctor who invented them
and oversaw Henrietta’s radium treatment. He would later die of
cancer, most likely caused by his regular exposure to radium, as
would a resident who traveled with Kelly and also transported radium
in his pockets.
One nurse placed the Brack plaques on a stainless-steel tray.
Another wheeled Henrietta into the small colored-only operating
room on the second floor, with stainless-steel tables, huge glaring
lights, and an all-white medical staff dressed in white gowns, hats,
masks, and gloves.
With Henrietta unconscious on the operating table in the center of
the room, her feet in stirrups, the surgeon on duty, Dr. Lawrence
Wharton Jr., sat on a stool between her legs. He peered inside
Henrietta, dilated her cervix, and prepared to treat her tumor. But
first—though no one had told Henrietta that TeLinde was collecting
samples or asked if she wanted to be a donor—Wharton picked up a
sharp knife and shaved two dime-sized pieces of tissue from
Henrietta’s cervix: one from her tumor, and one from the healthy
cervical tissue nearby. Then he placed the samples in a glass dish.
Wharton slipped a tube filled with radium inside Henrietta’s cervix,
and sewed it in place. He sewed a plaque filled with radium to the
outer surface of her cervix and packed another plaque against it. He
slid several rolls of gauze inside her vagina to help keep the radium in
place, then threaded a catheter into her bladder so she could urinate
without disturbing the treatment.
When Wharton finished, a nurse wheeled Henrietta back into the
ward, and Wharton wrote in her chart, “The patient tolerated the
procedure well and left the operating room in good condition.” On a
separate page he wrote, “Henrietta Lacks … Biopsy of cervical tissue
… Tissue given to Dr. George Gey.”
A resident took the dish with the samples to Gey’s lab, as he’d done
many times before. Gey still got excited at moments like this, but
everyone else in his lab saw Henrietta’s sample as something tedious
—the latest of what felt like countless samples that scientists and lab
technicians had been trying and failing to grow for years. They were
sure Henrietta’s cells would die just like all the others.
4
The Birth of HeLa
Gey’s twenty-one-year-old assistant, Mary Kubicek, sat eating a
tuna-salad sandwich at a long stone culture bench that doubled as a
break table. She and Margaret and the other women in the Gey lab
spent countless hours there, all in nearly identical cat-eye-glasses with
fat dark frames and thick lenses, their hair pulled back in tight buns.
At first glance, the room could have been an industrial kitchen.
There were gallon-sized tin coffee cans full of utensils and glassware;
powdered creamer, sugar, spoons, and soda bottles on the table; huge
metal freezers lining one wall; and deep sinks Gey made by hand
using stones he collected from a nearby quarry. But the teapot sat
next to a Bunsen burner, and the freezers were filled with blood,
placentas, tumor samples, and dead mice (plus at least one duck Gey
kept frozen in the lab for more than twenty years after a hunting trip,
since it wouldn’t fit in his freezer at home). Gey had lined one wall
with cages full of squealing rabbits, rats, and guinea pigs; on one side
of the table where Mary sat eating her lunch, he’d built shelves
holding cages full of mice, their bodies filled with tumors. Mary
always stared at them while she ate, just as she was doing when Gey
walked into the lab carrying the pieces of Henrietta’s cervix.
“I’m putting a new sample in your cubicle,” he told her.
Mary pretended not to notice. Not again, she thought, and kept
eating her sandwich. It can wait till I’m done.
Mary knew she shouldn’t wait—every moment those cells sat in the
dish made it more likely they’d die. But she was tired of cell culture,
tired of meticulously cutting away dead tissue like gristle from a
steak, tired of having cells die after hours of work.
Why bother? she thought.
Gey hired Mary for her hands. She was fresh out of college with a
physiology degree when her adviser sent her for an interview. Gey
asked Mary to pick up a pen from the table and write a few sentences.
Now pick up that knife, he said. Cut this piece of paper. Twirl this
pipette.
Mary didn’t realize until months later that he’d been studying her
hands, checking their dexterity and strength to see how they’d stand
up to hours of delicate cutting, scraping, tweezing, and pipetting.
By the time Henrietta walked into Hopkins, Mary was handling
most of the tissue samples that came through the door, and so far all
samples from TeLinde’s patients had died.
At that point, there were many obstacles to growing cells
successfully. For starters, no one knew exactly what nutrients they
needed to survive, or how best to supply them. Many researchers,
including the Geys, had been trying for years to develop the perfect
culture medium—the liquid used for feeding cells. The recipes for Gey
Culture Medium evolved constantly as George and Margaret added
and removed ingredients, searching for the perfect balance. But they
all sounded like witches’ brews: the plasma of chickens, purée of calf
fetuses, special salts, and blood from human umbilical cords. George
had rigged a bell and cable from the window of his lab across a
courtyard to the Hopkins maternity ward, so nurses could ring
anytime a baby was born, and Margaret or Mary would run over and
collect umbilical cord blood.
The other ingredients weren’t so easy to come by: George visited
local slaughterhouses at least once a week to collect cow fetuses and
chicken blood. He’d drive there in his rusted-out old Chevy, its left
fender flapping against the pavement, shooting sparks. Well before
dawn, in a rundown wooden building with a sawdust floor and wide
gaps in the walls, Gey would grab a screaming chicken by the legs,
yank it upside down from its cage, and wrestle it to its back on a
butcher block. He’d hold its feet in one hand and pin its neck
motionless to the wood with his elbow. With his free hand, he’d
squirt the bird’s chest with alcohol, and plunge a syringe needle into
the chicken’s heart to draw blood. Then he’d stand the bird upright,
saying, “Sorry, old fella,” and put it back in its cage. Every once in a
while, when a chicken dropped dead from the stress, George took it
home so Margaret could fry it for dinner.
Like many procedures in their lab, the Gey Chicken Bleeding
Technique was Margaret’s creation. She worked out the method stepby-step, taught it to George, and wrote detailed instructions for the
many other researchers who wanted to learn it.
Finding the perfect medium was an ongoing experiment, but the
biggest problem facing cell culture was contamination. Bacteria and a
host of other microorganisms could find their way into cultures from
people’s unwashed hands, their breath, and dust particles floating
through the air, and destroy them. But Margaret had been trained as
a surgical nurse, which meant sterility was her specialty—it was key
to preventing deadly infections in patients in the operating room.
Many would later say that Margaret’s surgical training was the only
reason the Gey lab was able to grow cells at all. Most culturists, like
George, were biologists; they knew nothing about preventing
contamination.
Margaret taught George everything he knew about keeping cultures
sterile, and she did the same with every technician, grad student, and
scientist who came to work or study in the lab. She hired a local
woman named Minnie whose sole job was washing the laboratory
glassware using the only product Margaret would allow: Gold Dust
Twins soap. Margaret was so serious about that soap, when she heard
a rumor that the company might go out of business, she bought an
entire boxcar full of it.
Margaret patrolled the lab, arms crossed, and leaned over Minnie’s
shoulder as she worked, towering nearly a foot above her. If Margaret
ever smiled, no one could have seen it through her ever-present
surgical mask. She inspected all the glassware for spots or smudges,
and when she found them—which was often—she’d scream,
“MINNIE!” so loud that Mary cringed.
Mary followed Margaret’s sterilizing rules meticulously to avoid her
wrath. After finishing her lunch, and before touching Henrietta’s
sample, Mary covered herself with a clean white gown, surgical cap,
and mask, and then walked to her cubicle, one of four airtight rooms
George had built by hand in the center of the lab. The cubicles were
small, only five feet in any direction, with doors that sealed like a
freezer’s to prevent contaminated air from getting inside. Mary turned
on the sterilizing system and watched from outside as her cubicle
filled with hot steam to kill anything that might damage the cells.
When the steam cleared, she stepped inside and sealed the door
behind her, then hosed the cubicle’s cement floor with water and
scoured her workbench with alcohol. The air inside was filtered and
piped in through a vent on the ceiling. Once she’d sterilized the
cubicle, she lit a Bunsen burner and used its flame to sterilize test
tubes and a used scalpel blade, since the Gey lab couldn’t afford new
ones for each sample.
Only then did she pick up the pieces of Henrietta’s cervix—forceps
in one hand, scalpel in the other—and carefully slice them into onemillimeter squares. She sucked each square into a pipette, and
dropped them one at a time onto chicken-blood clots she’d placed at
the bottom of dozens of test tubes. She covered each clot with several
drops of culture medium, plugged the tubes with rubber stoppers, and
labeled each one as she’d labeled most cultures they grew: using the
first two letters of the patient’s first and last names.
After writing “HeLa,” for Henrietta and Lacks, in big black letters on
the side of each tube, Mary carried them to the incubator room that
Gey had built just like he’d built everything else in the lab: by hand
and mostly from junkyard scraps, a skill he’d learned from a lifetime
of making do with nothing.
George Gey was born in 1899 and raised on a Pittsburgh hillside
overlooking a steel mill. Soot from the smokestacks made his parents’
small white house look like it had been permanently charred by fire
and left the afternoon sky dark. His mother worked the garden and
fed her family from nothing but the food she raised. As a child,
George dug a small coal mine in the hill behind his parents’ house.
He’d crawl through the damp tunnel each morning with a pick, filling
buckets for his family and neighbors so they could keep their houses
warm and stoves burning.
Gey paid his way through a biology degree at the University of
Pittsburgh by working as a carpenter and mason, and he could make
nearly anything for cheap or free. During his second year in medical
school, he rigged a microscope with a time-lapse motion picture
camera to capture live cells on film. It was a Frankensteinish
mishmash of microscope parts, glass, and 16-millimeter camera
equipment from who knows where, plus metal scraps, and old motors
from Shapiro’s junkyard. He built it in a hole he’d blasted in the
foundation of Hopkins, right below the morgue, its base entirely
underground and surrounded by a thick wall of cork to keep it from
jiggling when street cars passed. At night, a Lithuanian lab assistant
slept next to the camera on a cot, listening to its constant tick, making
sure it stayed stable through the night, waking every hour to refocus
it. With that camera, Gey and his mentor, Warren Lewis, filmed the
growth of cells, a process so slow—like the growth of a flower—the
naked eye couldn’t see it. They played the film at high speed so they
could watch cell division on the screen in one smooth motion, like a
story unfolding in a flip book.
It took Gey eight years to get through medical school because he
kept dropping out to work construction and save for another year’s
tuition. After he graduated, he and Margaret built their first lab in a
janitor’s quarters at Hopkins—they spent weeks wiring, painting,
plumbing, building counters and cabinets, paying for much of it with
their own money.
Margaret was cautious and stable, the backbone of the lab. George
was an enormous, mischievous, grown-up kid. At work he was
dapper, but at home he lived in flannels, khakis, and suspenders. He
moved boulders around his yard on weekends, ate twelve ears of corn
in one sitting, and kept barrels full of oysters in his garage so he could
shuck and eat them anytime he wanted. He had the body of a retired
linebacker, six feet four inches tall and 215 pounds, his back
unnaturally stiff and upright from having his spine fused so he’d stop
throwing it out. When his basement wine-making factory exploded on
a Sunday, sending a flood of sparkling burgundy through his garage
and into the street, Gey just washed the wine into a storm drain,
waving at his neighbors as they walked to church.
Gey was a reckless visionary—spontaneous, quick to start dozens of
projects at once, filling the lab and his basement at home with halfbuilt machines, partial discoveries, and piles of junkyard scraps only
he could imagine using in a lab. Whenever an idea hit him, he sat
wherever he was—at his desk, kitchen table, a bar, or behind the
wheel of his car—gnawing on his ever-present cigar and scribbling
diagrams on napkins or the backs of torn-off bottle labels. That’s how
he came up with the roller-tube culturing technique, his most
important invention.
It involved a large wooden roller drum, a cylinder with holes for
special test tubes called roller tubes. The drum, which Gey called the
“whirligig,” turned like a cement mixer twenty-four hours a day,
rotating so slowly it made only two full turns an hour, sometimes less.
For Gey, the rotation was crucial: he believed that culture medium
needed to be in constant motion, like blood and fluids in the body,
which flow around cells, transporting waste and nutrients.
When Mary finally finished cutting the samples of Henrietta’s
cervix and dropping them in dozens of roller tubes, she walked into
the incubator room, slid the tubes one at a time into the drum, and
turned it on. Then she watched as Gey’s machine began churning
slowly.
Henrietta spent the next two days in the hospital, recovering from
her first radium treatment. Doctors examined her inside and out,
pressing on her stomach, inserting new catheters into her bladder,
fingers into her vagina and anus, needles into her veins. They wrote
notes in her chart saying, “30 year-old colored female lying quietly in
no evident distress,” and “Patient feels quite well tonight. Morale is
good and she is ready to go home.”
Before Henrietta left the hospital, a doctor put her feet in the
stirrups again and removed the radium. He sent her home with
instructions to call the clinic if she had problems, and to come back
for a second dose of radium in two and a half weeks.
Meanwhile, each morning after putting Henrietta’s cells in culture,
Mary started her days with the usual sterilization drill. She peered
into the tubes, laughing to herself and thinking, Nothing’s happening.
Big surprise. Then, two days after Henrietta went home from the
hospital, Mary saw what looked like little rings of fried egg white
around the clots at the bottoms of each tube. The cells were growing,
but Mary didn’t think much of it—other cells had survived for a while
in the lab.
But Henrietta’s cells weren’t merely surviving, they were growing
with mythological intensity. By the next morning they’d doubled.
Mary divided the contents of each tube into two, giving them room to
grow, and within twenty-four hours, they’d doubled again. Soon she
was dividing them into four tubes, then six. Henrietta’s cells grew to
fill as much space as Mary gave them.
Still, Gey wasn’t ready to celebrate. “The cells could die any
minute,” he told Mary.
But they didn’t. They kept growing like nothing anyone had seen,
doubling their numbers every twenty-four hours, stacking hundreds
on top of hundreds, accumulating by the millions. “Spreading like
crabgrass!” Margaret said. They grew twenty times faster than
Henrietta’s normal cells, which died only a few days after Mary put
them in culture. As long as they had food and warmth, Henrietta’s
cancer cells seemed unstoppable.
Soon, George told a few of his closest colleagues that he thought his
lab might have grown the first immortal human cells.
To which they replied, Can I have some? And George said yes.
5
“Blackness Be Spreadin All Inside”
Henrietta knew nothing about her cells growing in a laboratory.
After leaving the hospital, she went back to life as usual. She’d never
loved the city, so almost every weekend she took the children back to
Clover, where she worked the tobacco fields and spent hours
churning butter on the steps of the home-house. Though radium often
causes relentless nausea, vomiting, weakness, and anemia, there’s no
record of Henrietta having any side effects, and no one remembers
her complaining of feeling sick.
When she wasn’t in Clover, Henrietta spent her time cooking for
Day, the children, and whichever cousins happened to be at her
house. She made her famous rice pudding and slow-cooked greens,
chitlins, and the vats of spaghetti with meatballs she kept going on
the stove for whenever cousins dropped by hungry. When Day wasn’t
working the night shift, he and Henrietta spent evenings at home,
playing cards and listening to Bennie Smith play blues guitar on the
radio after the kids went to sleep. On the nights Day worked,
Henrietta and Sadie would wait until the door slammed, count to one
hundred, then jump out of bed, put on their dancing clothes, and
sneak out of the house, careful not to wake the children. Once they
got outside, they’d wiggle their hips and squeal, scampering down the
street to the dance floors at Adams Bar and Twin Pines.
“We used to really swing out heavy,” Sadie told me years later. “We
couldn’t help it. They played music that when you heard it just put
your soul into it. We’d two-step across that floor, jiggle to some blues,
then somebody maybe put a quarter in there and play a slow music
song, and Lord we’d just get out there and shake and turn around and
all like that!” She giggled like a young girl. “It was some beautiful
times.” And they were beautiful women.
Henrietta had walnut eyes, straight white teeth, and full lips. She
was a sturdy woman with a square jaw, thick hips, short, muscular
legs, and hands rough from tobacco fields and kitchens. She kept her
nails short so bread dough wouldn’t stick under them when she
kneaded it, but she always painted them a deep red to match her
toenails.
Henrietta spent hours taking care of those nails, touching up chips
and brushing on new coats of polish. She’d sit on her bed, polish in
hand, hair high on her head in curlers, wearing the silky slip she
loved so much she hand-washed it each night. She never wore pants,
and rarely left the house without pulling on a carefully pressed skirt
and shirt, sliding her feet into her tiny, open-toed pumps, and pinning
her hair up with a little flip at the bottom, “just like it was dancin
toward her face,” Sadie always said.
“Hennie made life come alive—bein with her was like bein with
fun,” Sadie told me, staring toward the ceiling as she talked. “Hennie
just love peoples. She was a person that could really make the good
things come out of you.”
But there was one person Henrietta couldn’t bring out any good in.
Ethel, the wife of their cousin Galen, had recently come to Turner
Station from Clover, and she hated Henrietta—her cousins always
said it was jealousy.
“I guess I can’t say’s I blame her,” Sadie said. “Galen, that husband
of Ethel’s, he was likin Hennie more than he like Ethel. Lord, he
followed Hennie! Everywhere she go, there go Galen—he tried to stay
up at Hennie house all the time when Day gone to work. Lord, Ethel
was jealous—made her hateful to Hennie somethin fierce. Always
seemed like she wanted to hurt Hennie.” So Henrietta and Sadie
would giggle and slip out the back to another club anytime Ethel
showed up.
When they weren’t sneaking out, Henrietta, Sadie, and Sadie’s sister
Margaret spent evenings in Henrietta’s living room, playing bingo,
yelling, and laughing over a pot of pennies while Henrietta’s babies—
David Jr., Deborah, and Joe—played with the bingo chips on the
carpet beneath the table. Lawrence was nearly sixteen, already out
having a life of his own. But one child was missing: Henrietta’s oldest
daughter, Elsie.
Before Henrietta got sick, she took Elsie down to Clover every time
she went. Elsie would sit on the stoop of the home-house, staring into
the hills and watching the sunrise as Henrietta worked in the garden.
She was beautiful, delicate and feminine like Henrietta, who dressed
her in homemade outfits with bows and spent hours braiding her long
brown curls. Elsie never talked, she just cawed and chirped like a bird
as she waved her hands inches from her face. She had wide chestnut
eyes that everyone stared into, trying to understand what went on in
that pretty head. But she just stared back, unflinching, her eyes
haunted with fear and sadness that only softened when Henrietta
rocked her back and forth.
Sometimes Elsie raced through the fields, chasing wild turkeys or
grabbing the family mule by the tail and thrashing against him until
Lawrence pulled her off. Henrietta’s cousin Peter always said God had
that child from the moment she was born, because that mule never
hurt her. It was so mean it snapped at air like a rabid dog and kicked
at the wind, but it seemed to know Elsie was special. Still, as she
grew, she fell, she ran into walls and doors, burned herself against the
woodstove. Henrietta made Day drive her and Elsie to revival
meetings so preachers in tents could lay hands on Elsie to heal her,
but it never worked. In Turner Station, sometimes Elsie bolted from
the house and ran through the street screaming.
By the time Henrietta got pregnant with baby Joe, Elsie was too big
for Henrietta to handle alone, especially with two babies. The doctors
said that sending Elsie away was the best thing. So now she was
living about an hour and a half south of Baltimore, at Crownsville
State Hospital—formerly known as the Hospital for the Negro Insane.
Henrietta’s cousins always said a bit of Henrietta died the day they
sent Elsie away, that losing her was worse than anything else that
happened to her. Now, nearly a year later, Henrietta still had Day or
a cousin take her from Turner Station to Crownsville once a week to
sit with Elsie, who’d cry and cling to her as they played with each
other’s hair.
Henrietta had a way with children—they were always good and
quiet when she was around. But whenever she left the house,
Lawrence stopped being good. If the weather was nice, he’d run to
the old pier in Turner Station, where Henrietta had forbidden him to
go. The pier had burned down years earlier, leaving tall wooden
pilings that Lawrence and his friends liked to dive from. One of
Sadie’s sons nearly drowned out there from hitting his head on a rock,
and Lawrence was always coming home with eye infections that
everyone blamed on the water being contaminated by Sparrows
Point. Anytime Henrietta got word that Lawrence was at the pier,
she’d storm down there, drag him out of the water, and whip him.
“Ooooh Lord,” Sadie said once, “Hennie went down there with a
switch. Yes Lord. She pitched a boogie like I never seen.” But those
were the only times anyone could ever remember seeing Henrietta
mad. “She was tough,” Sadie said. “Nothin scared Hennie.”
For a month and a half, no one in Turner Station knew Henrietta
was sick. The cancer was easy to keep secret, because she only had to
go back to Hopkins once, for a checkup and a second radium
treatment. At that point the doctors liked what they saw: her cervix
was a bit red and inflamed from the first treatment, but the tumor
was shrinking. Regardless, she had to start X-ray therapy, which
meant visiting Hopkins every weekday for a month. For that, she
needed help: Henrietta lived twenty minutes from Hopkins, and Day
wo…
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