The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

As a Scientist myself, I have encountered HeLa cells many times not just in actual use but as well as in textbook theories. I never thought they came from a Black Woman named Henrietta Lacks. Her cells became immortal and now being used extensively in research labs.

After reading this book, I find it amazing that a cell would become “immortal.” There are those who are pledging that their organs be donated after their death to be transplanted to another person so that their life will continue to persist but after the recipient has died, those transplanted organs will die too but Henrietta’s cells were different, her cells has already celebrated “Silver Jubilee” and may even reach a Gold or Diamond Anniversary. That’s how immortal she is.

This book is must have for Lab Technicians, Nurses, X–ray Technicians, OB–Gyne, Pathologist, Surgeons and Medical Researchers and Journalist.

Henrietta should be lined to the ranks of Rosa Parks and Maya Angelou. She revolutionize science through her cells. And as a Scientist, all I can say is “Thank you very much, Henrietta!” and as for the future of my research, all I’ll be asking from her cells is, “Give it to me.”

Here are some excerpts from the book,

On page 1, “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 nearly 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.

On page 4, “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 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 and entire generation every twenty–four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.”

On page 5, “Henrietta’s cells have now been living outside her body FAR LONGER than they ever lived inside it.”

On page 8, “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.”

On page 9, “…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.”

On page 18, “David drove Henrietta nearly twenty miles to get there, not because they preferred it, but because it was the only major hospital for 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 fountain.”

On page 19, “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 and 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.”

On page 25, “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.”

On page 31, “The work was tough, especially for black men, who got the jobs white men wouldn’t touch.”

On page 36, “Like many doctors in 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.”

On page 39, “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.”

On page 49, “Gey was a reckless visionary – spontaneous, quick to start dozens of projects at once, filling the lab and his basement at home with half–built 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.”

On page 50, “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.”

On page 53, “Henrietta had walnut eyes, straight white teeth, and full lips. She was a sturdy woman with 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.”

On page 55, “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.”

On page 62, “I told him about the Tuskegee syphilis study like I was giving and oral report in history class: It started in the thirties, when U.S. Public Health Service researchers at the Tuskegee Institute decided to study how syphilis killed, from infection to death. They recruited hundreds of African–American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful, and preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin could cure them. They were poor and uneducated, and the researchers offered incentives: free physical exams, hot meals, and rides into town on clinic days, plus fifty–dollar burial stipends for their families when the men died. The researchers chose black subjects because they, like many whites at the time, believed black people were “a notoriously syphilis–soaked race.”

On page 64, “After three straight days of grilling, Patillo finally decided to give me Deborah’s phone number. But first, he said, there were a few things I needed to know. He lowered his voice and rattled off a list of do’s and don’ts for dealing with Deborah Lacks: Don’t be aggressive. Do be honest. Don’t be clinical, don’t worry to force her into anything, don’t talk down to her, she hates that. Do be compassionate, don’t forget that she’s been through a lot with these cells, do have patience. “You’ll need that more than anything,” he told me.”

On page 74, “But Carrel wasn’t interested in immortality for the masses. He was a eugenicist: organ transplantation and life extension were ways to preserve what he saw as the superior white race, which he believed was being POLLUTED by less intelligent and inferior stock, namely the poor, uneducated, and non–white. He dreamed of never–ending life for those he deemed worthy, and death or forced sterilization for everyone else. He’d later praise Hitler for the “energetic measures” he took in that direction.”

On page 77, “Either way, by 1951, when Henrietta Lacks’s cells began growing in the Gey lab – just five years after the widely publicized “death” of Carrel’s chicken heart – the public image of immortal cells was tarnished. Tissue culture was the stuff of racism, creepy science fiction, Nazis, and snake oil. It wasn’t something to be celebrated. In fact, no one paid much attention to it at all.”

On page 79, “Especially black patients in public wards. This was 1951 in Baltimore, segregation was law, and it was understood that black people didn’t question white people’s professional judgment. Many black patients were just glad to be getting treatment, since discrimination in hospitals was widespread.”

On page 82, “I’ll never forget it,” Aurelian said. “George told me he leaned over Henrietta’s bed and said, “Your cells will make you IMMORTAL.” He told Henrietta her cells would help save the lives of countless people, and she smiled. She told him she was glad her pain would come to some good for someone.”

On page 107, “Henrietta died at 12:15am on October 4,1951.”

On page 111, “There was no obituary for Henrietta Lacks, but word of her death reached the Gey lab quickly. As Henrietta’s body cooled in the “colored” freezer, Gey asked her doctors if they’d do an autopsy. Tissue culturists around the world had been trying to create a library of immortal cells like Henrietta’s, and Gey wanted samples from as many organs in her body as possible, to see if they’d grow like HeLa. But to get these samples after death, someone would have to ask Henrietta’s husband for permission.”

On page 112, “The official cause of Henrietta’s death was terminal uremia: blood poisoning from build–up of toxins normally flushed out of the body in urine. The tumors had completely blocked her urethra, leaving her doctors unable to pass a catheter into her bladder to empty it. Tumors the size of baseballs had nearly replaced her kidneys, bladder, ovaries, and uterus. And her other organs were so covered in small white tumors it looked as if someone had filled her with pearls.”

On page 115, “The morning of Henrietta’s funeral, Day walked through the mud with Deborah, Joe, Sonny, and Lawrence. But not Elsie. She still in Crownsville and didn’t even know her mother had died.”

On page 115 also, “As Cliff and Fred lowered Henrietta’s coffin into her grave and began covering her with handfuls of dirt, the sky turned black as strap molasses. The rain fell thick and fast. Then came long rumbling thunder, screams from the babies, and a blast of wind so strong it tore the metal roof off the barn below the cemetery and sent it flying through the air above Henrietta’s grave, its long metal slopes flapping like the wings of a giant silver bird. The wind caused fires that burned tobacco fields. It ripped trees from the ground, blew power lines out for miles, and tore one Lacks cousin’s wooden cabin clear out of the ground, threw him from the living room into his garden, then landed on top of him, killing him instantly.”

On page 116, “Not long after Henrietta’s death, planning began for a HeLa factory – a massive operation that would grow to produce trillions of HeLa cells each week. It was built for one reason: to help stop polio.”

“By the end of 1951 the world was in the midst of the biggest polio epidemic in history. Schools closed, parents panicked, and the public grew desperate for a vaccine. In February 1952, Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh announced that he’d developed the world’s first polio vaccine, but he couldn’t begin offering it to children until he’d tested it on a large scale to prove it was safe and effective. And doing that would require culturing cells on an enormous, industrial scale, which no one had done before.”

“The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) – a charity created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who’d himself been paralyzed by polio – began organizing the largest field trial ever conducted to test the polio vaccine. Salk would inoculate 2 million children and the NFIP would test their blood to see if they’d become immune. But doing this would require millions of neutralization test, which involved mixing blood serum from newly vaccinated children with live poliovirus and protect the cells. If it didn’t work. The virus would infect the cells, causing damage scientists could see using a microscope.”

“The trouble was, at that point, the cells used in neutralization tests came from monkeys, which were killed in the process. This was a problem, not because of concern of animal welfare – which wasn’t the issue then that it is today – but because monkeys were expensive. Doing millions of neutralization tests using monkey cells would costs millions of dollars. So the NFIP went into overdrive looking for a cultured cell that would grow on a massive scale and would be cheaper than using monkey.”

On page 118, “The discovery meant that if Hela was susceptible to poliovirus, which not all cells were, it would solve the mass–production problem and make it possible to test the vaccine without millions of monkey cells.”

On page 121, “BLACK scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them WHITE.”

On page 121 also, “If researchers wanted to figure out how cells behaved in a certain environment, or reacted to a specific chemical, or produced a certain protein, they turned to Henrietta’s cells. They did that because, despite being cancerous, HeLa still shared many basic characteristics with normal cells: They produced proteins and communicated with one another like normal cells, they divided and generated energy, they expressed genes and regulated them, and they were susceptible to infections, which made them an optimal tool for synthesizing and studying any number of things in culture, including bacteria, hormones, proteins, and especially viruses.”

On page 121 also, “When it came to growing viruses – as with many other things – the fact that HeLa was malignant just made it more useful. HeLa cells grew much faster than normal cells, and therefore produced results faster. HeLa was a workhorse: it was hardy, it was inexpensive, and was everywhere.”

On page 122, “Henrietta’s cells helped launch the fledging field of virology, but that was just the beginning. In the years following Henrietta’s death, using some of the first tubes of her cells, researchers around the world made several important scientific advances in quick succession. First, a group of researchers used HeLa to develop methods for freezing cells without harming or changing them. This made it possible to send cells around the world using the already – standardized method for shipping frozen foods and frozen sperm for breeding cattle. It also meant researchers could store cells between experiments without worrying about keeping them fed and sterile. But what excited scientists most was that freezing gave them a means to suspend cells in various states of being.”

“Freezing a cell was like pressing a pause button: cell division, metabolism, and everything else simply stopped, then resumed after thawing as if you’d just pressed play again. Scientists could now pause cells at various intervals during an experiment so they could compare how certain cells reacted to a specific drug one week, then two, then six after exposure. They could look at identical cells at different points in time, to study how they changed with age. And by freezing cells at various points, they believed they could see the actual moment when a normal cell growing in culture became malignant, a phenomenon they called spontaneous transformation.”

On page 123, “And replication is an essential part of science: a discovery isn’t considered valid if others can’t repeat the work and get the same result. Without standardized materials and methods, they worried that the field of tissue culture would stagnate.”

On page 127, “As the Cold War escalated, some scientists exposed Henrietta’s cells to massive doses of radiation to study how nuclear bombs destroyed cells and find ways to reverse the damage. Others put them in special centrifuges that spun so fast that pressure inside was more than 100,000 times that of gravity, to see what happened to human cells under the extreme conditions of deep–see diving or spaceflight.”

On page 130, “And as soon as HeLa became “general scientific property,” people started wondering about the woman behind the cells.”

On page 131, “Sure enough, on November 2, 1953, the Minneapolis Star became the first publication to name the woman behind the HeLa cells. There was just one thing – the reporter got her name wrong. HeLa, the story said, was “from a Baltimore woman named Henrietta Lakes.”

On page 139, “The Lacks children had to work from sunup to sundown; they weren’t allowed to take breaks, and they got no food or water until nightfall, even when the summer heat burned. Ethel would watch from the couch or a window, and if one of them stopped working before she told them to, she’d beat them all bloody. At one point, she beat Sonny so badly with an extension cord, he ended up in the hospital. But Joe got the worst of Ethel’s rage.”

On page 140, “Joe grew into the meanest, angriest child any Lacks had ever known, and the family started saying something must have happened to his brain while he was growing inside Henrietta alongside that cancer.”

On page 145, “Like her brother, she’d always struggled in school because she couldn’t hear the teacher. None of the Lacks children could hear much unless the person speaking was nearby, talking loud and slow. But they’d been taught to keep quiet with adults, so they never told their teachers how much they were missing. None of them would realize the extent of the deafness or get hearing aids until later in life.”

On page 152, “Don’t nobody say anything about it around here. I just knowed she had something rare, cause she been dead a pretty good while, but her cells still living, and that’s amazing.” He kicked at the ground. “I heard they did a lot of research and some of her cells have developed a lot of curing other diseases. It’s a miracle, that all I can say.”

On page 155, “Standing in the cemetery, Cliff told me, “The WHITE Lackses know their kin all buried in here with ours cause they family. They know it, but they’ll never admit it. They just say, “Them BLACK Lackses, they ain’t kin!”

On page 156, “When I ask how she and Carlton were related to the black Lackses, they looked at each other from across the coffee table like I’d asked if they were born on Mars.”

On page 157, “Lillian’s skin was real light, even lighter than mom’s,” Gary explained. “She married a Puerto Rican somewhere in New York. Since she could pass, she disowned her blackness – converted to Puerto Rican because she didn’t want to be black no more.”

On page 161, “Again and again reporters asked, “Why did you volunteer for this test?”

“The prisoners’ replies were like a refrain: “I done a girl a great injustice, and I think it’ll pay back a little bit what I did to her.”

“I believe the wrong that I have done, in the eyes of society, this might make a right on it.”

“Southam gave multiple cancer cell injections to each prisoner, and unlike the terminally ill patients, those men fought off the cancer completely. And with each new injection, their bodies responded faster, which seemed to indicate that the cells were increasing the inmates’ immunity to cancer. When Southam reported his results, the press hailed them as tremendous breakthrough that could someday lead to a cancer vaccine.”

On page 163, “But when he instructed his staff to give the injections without telling patients they contained cancer cells, three young JEWISH doctors refused, saying they wouldn’t conduct research on patients without their consent. All three knew about the research Nazis had done on Jewish prisoners. They also knew about the famous Nuremberg Trials.”

“Sixteen years earlier, on August 20,1947, a U.S.–led international war tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, had sentenced seven Nazi doctors to death by hanging. Their crime was conducting unthinkable research on Jews without consent – sewing siblings together to create Siamese twins, dissecting people alive to study organ function.”

“The tribunal set forth a ten–point code of ethics now known as Nuremberg Code, which was to govern all human experimentation worldwide. The first line in that code says, “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” The idea was revolutionary. The Hippocratic Oath, written in the fourth century BC, didn’t require patient consent. And though the American Medical Association had issued rules protecting laboratory animals in 1910, no such rules existed for humans until Nuremberg.”

On page 171, “When the first humans went into orbit, Henrietta’s cells went with them so researchers could study the effects of space travel, as well as the nutritional needs of cells in space, and how cancerous and noncancerous cells responded differently to zero gravity. What they found was disturbing: in mission after mission, noncancerous cells grew normally in orbit, but HeLa became more powerful, dividing faster with each trip.”

On page 176, “In addition to the HeLa–mouse hybrid, Harris fused HeLa with chicken cells that had lost their ability to reproduce. His hunch was that when those deactivated chicken cells fused with HeLa, something inside HeLa would essentially turn the chicken cell back on. He was right. He didn’t know how it worked yet, but his discovery showed that something in cells regulated genes. And if scientists could figure out how to turn disease genes off, they might be able to create a form of gene therapy.”

On page 177, “The Times of London called the HeLa–mouse cells the “strangest hybrid form of life ever seen in the lab – or out of it.” A Washington Post editorial said, “We cannot afford any artificially induced mouse–men.” It called the research “horrendous” and said the researchers should leave humans alone and “go back to their yeasts and fungi.” One article ran with an image of half–human, half–mouse creature with a long, scaly tail; another ran with a cartoon of a hippopotamus–woman reading the newspaper at a bus stop. The British press called the HeLa hybrids an “assault on life,” and portrayed Harris a mad scientist. And Harris didn’t help the situation: he caused near–pandemonium when he appeared in a BBC documentary saying that the eggs of man and ape could now be joined to create a “mape.”

On page 186, “Joe found Islam and began spending all his time studying the Koran in his cell. Soon he changed his name to Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman.”

On page 201, “Miss Rebecca telling me about our MOTHER CELLS,” Lawrence said, “She told me fascinating stuff. Did you know our MOTHER CELLS gonna be used to make STEVIE WONDER SEE?”

On page 205, “Since at least the 1800s, black oral history has been filled with tales of “night doctors” who kidnapped black people for research. And there were disturbing truths behind those stories.”

On page 206, “Because of this history, black residents near Hopkins have long believed the hospital was built in a poor black neighborhood for the benefit of scientists – to give them easy access to potential research subjects. In fact, it was built for the benefit of Baltimore’s poor.”

“John Hopkins was born on a tobacco plantation in Maryland where his father later freed his slaves nearly sixty years before Emancipation. Hopkins made millions working as banker and grocer, and selling his own brand of whiskey, but he never married and had no children. So in 1873, not long before his death, he donated $7million to start a medical school and charity hospital. He wrote a letter to the twelve men he’d chosen to serve as its board of trustees, outlining his wishes. In it he explained that the purpose of Hopkins Hospital was to help those who otherwise couldn’t get medical care:

“The indigent sick of this city and its environs,

without regard to sex, age, or color, who require
surgical or medical treatment, and who can received
into the hospital without peril to other inmates,
and the poor of the city and State, of all
races, who are stricken down by any casualty,
shall be received into the hospital without charge.”

“He specified that the only patients to be charged were those who could easily afford it, and that any money they brought in should then be spent treating those without money. He also set aside an additional $2 million worth of property, and $20,000 in cash each year, specifically for helping black children.”

On page 209, “But today when people talk about the history of Hopkin’s relationship with the black community, the story many of them hold up as the worst offense is that of Henrietta Lacks – a black woman whose body, they say, was exploited by white scientists.”

On page 209, “Hopkins say they gave them cells away,” Lawrence yelled, “but they made millions! It’s not fair! She’s the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can we get health insurance?”

On page 210, “Everybody always saying Henrietta Lacks donated those cells. She didn’t donate nothing. They took them and didn’t ask.”

On page 214 “Regardless, Jones and his colleagues wrote, the new diagnosis was “but a footnote to the abiding genius of George Gey…It has been often said that scientist discovery results when the right man is in the right place at the right time.” Gey, they said, was precisely that man. And HeLa was the result of that luck. “If allowed to grow uninhibited under optimal cultural conditions, [HeLa] would have taken over the world by this time,” they wrote. “The biopsy…has secured for the patient, Henrietta Lacks as HeLa, an immortality which has now reached 20 years. Will she live forever if nurtured by the hands of future workers? Even now Henrietta Lacks, first as Henrietta and then as HeLa, has a combined age of 51 years.”

On page 217, “Rumors spread about the identity of this mysterious Helen L. Some said she’d been Gey’s secretary, or maybe his mistress. Others said she was a prostitute off the streets near Hopkins or a figment of Gey’s imagination, a fictitious character he’d created to hide the true identity of the woman behind the cells.”

On page 225, “If they’re doing research on Henrietta, she thought, it’s only a matter of time before they come for Henrietta’s children, and maybe her grandchildren.”

On page 230, “When Henrietta died, Day had agreed to let her doctors do an autopsy because they’d told him it might his children someday. They must have been telling the truth, Day thought. Zakariyya was in Henrietta’s womb when she first got the cancer, and he’d had all those anger problems ever since. Now Deborah was almost twenty–four, not much younger than Henrietta had been when she died. It made sense they were calling saying it was time for her to get tested.”

“Deborah panicked. She knew her mother had gotten sick at thirty, so she’d long feared her own thirtieth birthday, figuring that whatever happened to her mother at that age would happen to her too. And Deborah couldn’t stand the idea of her own children growing up motherless like she had. At that point, LaTonya was two, Alfred was six and Cheetah had never paid child support. Deborah had tried welfare for three months but hated it, so now she was working days at a suburban Toys “R” Us that took more than an hour and three buses to get to, then nights at a hamburger place called Gino’s behind her apartment.”

“Since Deborah couldn’t afford a babysitter, her boss at Gino’s let Tonya and Alfred sit in the corner of the restaurant at night while Deborah worked. On her eight thirty dinner break, Deborah would run behind the building to her apartment and put the children to bed. They knew not to open the door unless they heard her secret knock, and they never put the kerosene lamps near a curtain or blanket. Deborah practiced fire drills with them in case something went wrong while she was at work, teaching them to crawl to the window, throw out a sheet–rope she kept tied to the bed leg, and climb to safety.

Those children were all Deborah had, and she wasn’t going to let anything happen to them. So when her father called saying Hopkins wanted to test to see if she had her mother’s cancer, Deborah sobbed, saying, “Lord don’t take me away from my babies, not now, not after everything we been through.”

On page 232, “So when one of McKusick’s assistants called Deborah and asked her to come into Hopkins to give more blood, she went, thinking that if her family couldn’t answer questions about her mother, maybe the scientists could. She didn’t know the blood was for a researcher in California who wanted some samples for his own HeLa research, and she didn’t know why McKusick’s assistant was calling her and not her brothers – she figured it was because the problem her mother had didn’t affect boys. She still thought she was being tested for cancer.”

On page 233, “With the ability to identify genes from a blood sample or even a single cell, the risk of a blood draw was no longer just a minor infection or the pain of a needle stick – it was that someone could uncover your genetic information. It was about violation of privacy.”

On page 234, “McKusick did not explain why he was having someone draw blood from Deborah. Instead he told her about Henrietta’s cells being used for the polio vaccine and genetic research; he said they’d gone up in early space missions and been used in atomic bomb testing. Deborah heard those things and imagined her mother on the moon and being blown up by bombs. She was terrified and couldn’t stop wondering if the parts of her mother they were using in research could actually feel the things scientist were doing to them.”

On page 240, “But in fact, Gey’s history indicates that he wasn’t particularly interested in science for profit: in the early 1940s he’d turned down a request to create and run the first commercial cell culture lab. Patenting cell lines is standard today, but it was unheard of in the fifties; regardless, it seems unlikely that Gey would have patented HeLa. He didn’t even patent the roller drum, which is still used today and could have made him a fortune.”

On page 241, “What we do know is that today, Invitrogen sells HeLa products that cost anywhere from $100 to nearly $10,000 per vial. A search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database turns up more than seventeen thousand patents involving HeLa cells. And there’s no way to quantify the professional gain many scientists have achieved with the help of HeLa.

The American Type Culture Collection – a non–profit whose funds go mainly toward maintaining and providing pure cultures for science – has been selling HeLa since the sixties. When this book went to press, their price per vial was $256. The ATCC won’t reveal how much money it brings in from HeLa sales each year, but since HeLa is one of the most popular cell lines in the world, that number is surely significant.”

On page 243, “The more Deborah struggled to understand her mother’s cell, the more HeLa research terrified her. When she saw a Newsweek article called PEOPLE–PLANTS that said scientists had crossed Henrietta Lack’s cells with tobacco cells, Deborah thought they’d created a human–plant monster that was half her mother, half–tobacco. When she found out scientists had been using HeLa cells to study viruses like AIDS and Ebola, Deborah imagined her mother eternally suffering the symptom of each disease: bone–crushing pain, bleeding eyes, suffocation.

On page 245, “Henrietta was a black woman born of slavery and sharecropping who fled north for prosperity, only to have her cells as tools by white scientists without her consent. It was a story of WHITE SELLING BLACK, of black cultures “contaminating” white ones with a single cell in an era when a person with “one drop” of black blood had only recently gained the legal right to marry a white person. It was also the story of cells from an uncredited black woman becoming one of the most important tools in medicine. This was big news.”

On page 250, “Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, a scientist working at General Electric who’d created a bacterium genetically engineered to consume oil and help clean up oil spills. He filed for a patent, which was denied on the grounds that no living organism could be considered an invention. Chakrabarty’s lawyers argued that since normal bacteria don’t consume oil, Chakrabarty’s bacteria weren’t naturally occurring – they only existed because he’d altered them using “human ingenuity.”

“Chakrabarty’s victory opened up the possibility of patenting other living things, including genetically modified animals and cell lines, which didn’t occur naturally outside the body. And patenting cell lines didn’t require informing or getting permission from the “cell donors.”

On page 252, “Moore, however, couldn’t sell the Mo cells because that would have violated Golde’s patent. So in 1984, Moore sued Golde and UCLA for deceiving him and using his body in research without consent; he also claimed property rights over his tissues and sued Golde for stealing them. With that, he because the first person to legally stake a claim to his own tissue and sue for profits and damages.”

On page 253, “Scientists, lawyers, ethicists, and policymakers debated the issues: some called for legislation that would make it illegal for doctors to take patients’ cells or commercialize them without consent and the disclosure of potential profits; others argued that doing so would create a logistical nightmare that would put an end to medical progress.”

On page 254, “When you leave tissues in a doctor’s office or a lab, you abandon them as waste, and anyone can take your garbage and sell it. Since Moore had abandoned his cells, they were no longer a product of his body, the ruling said. They had been “transformed” into an invention and were now the product of Golde’s “human ingenuity” and “inventive effort.”

“Moore wasn’t awarded any of the profits, but the judge did agree with him on two counts: lack of informed consent, because Golde hadn’t disclosed his financial interests, and breach of fudiciary duty, meaning Golde had taken advantage of his position as doctor and violated patient trust. The court said researchers should disclose financial interests in patient tissues, though no law required it. It also pointed out the lack of regulation and patient protection in tissue research, and called on legislators to remedy the situation. But it said that ruling in Moore’s favor might “destroy the economic incentive to conduct important medical research,” and that giving patients property rights in their tissue might “hinder research by restricting access to the necessary raw materials,” creating a field where “with every cell sample a researcher purchases a ticket in a litigation lottery.”

“Scientist were triumphant, even smug. The dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine told a reported that as long as researchers disclosed their financial interests, patients, shouldn’t object to the use of their tissues. “If you did,” he said, “I guess you could sit there with your ruptured appendix and negotiate.”

On page 258, “Day would sometimes look out his bedroom window and see his son lying on the concrete, but when he invited him in, Zakariyya snarled and said that ground was better. Zakarriya blamed his father for Henrietta’s death, hated him for burying her in an unmarked grave, and never forgave him for leaving the children with Ethel. Day eventually stopped inviting him in, even though it sometimes meant walking past Zakarriya sleeping on the sidewalk.”

On page 262, “Regardless, it was not standard practice for a doctor to hand a patient’s medical records over to a reporter. Patient confidentiality has been an ethical tenet for centuries: the Hippocratic Oath, which most doctors take when graduating from medical school, says that being a physician requires the promise of confidentiality because without it, patients would never disclose the deeply personal information needed to make medical diagnoses. But the Nuremberg Code and the American Medical Association Code of Ethics, which clearly said that doctors should keep patient information confidential, the Hippocratic Oath wasn’t law.”

On page 263, “Several patient’s had successfully sued their doctors for privacy violations, including one whose medical records were released without consent, and others whose doctors either published photographs or showed videos of them publicly, all without consent. But those patients had one thing going for them that Henrietta didn’t: They were alive. And the dead have no right to privacy – even if part of them is still alive.”

On page 265, “Research into HPV eventually uncovered how Henrietta’s cancer started: HPV inserted its DNA into the long arm of her eleventh chromosome and essentially turned off her p53 tumor suppressor gene. What scientists still haven’t figured out is why this produced such monstrously virulent cells both in and out of Henrietta’s body, especially since cervical cancer cells are some of the hardest of all cells to culture.”

On page 265 also, “I talked to many scientists about HeLa, and none could explain why Henrietta’s cells grew so powerfully when many others didn’t even survive. Today it’s possible for scientists to immortalize cells by exposing them to certain viruses or chemicals, but very few cells have become immortal on their own as Henrietta’s did.”

On page 267, “Axel’s research caught the attention of Jeremy Rifkin, an author and activist who was deeply involved in a growing public debate over whether scientists should alter DNA. Rifkin and many others believed that any manipulation of DNA, even in a controlled laboratory setting, was dangerous because it might lead to genetic mutations and make it possible to engineer “designer babies.” Since there were no laws limiting genetic engineering, Rifkin regularly sued to stop it using any existing laws that might apply.”

On page 269, “Van Valen explained this idea years later, saying “HeLa cells are evolving separately from humans, and having a separate evolution is really what a species is all about.” Since the species name HeLa was already taken by a type of crab, the researchers proposed that the new HeLa cell species should be called Helacyton gartleri, which combined HeLa with cyton, which is Greek for “cell,” and gartleri, in honor of Stanley Gartler, who’d dropped the “HeLa Bomb” twenty–five years earlier.”

“No one challenged this idea, but no one acted on it either, so Henrietta’s cells remained classified as human. But even today some scientists argue that it’s factually incorrect to say that HeLa cells are related to Henrietta, since their DNA is no longer genetically identically to hers.”

On page 270, “After years of disbelief and argument, from other scientists, Hayflick’s paper on cell limits became one of the most widely cited in his field. It was an epiphany: scientist had been trying for decades to grow immortal cell lines using normal cells instead of malignant ones, but it had never worked. They thought their technique was the problem, when in fact it was simply that the lifespan of normal cells was pre–programmed. Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.”

On page 271, “By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa’s immortality: telomerase constantly rewound the ticking clock at the end of Henrietta’s chromosomes so they never grew old and never died. It was this immortality, and the strength with which Henrietta’s cells grew, that made it possible for HeLa to take over so many other cultures – they simply outlived and outgrew any other cells they encountered.”

On page 272, “The story of Henrietta Lacks eventually caught the attention of a BBC producer in London named Adam Curtis, and in 1996, he began making the documentary about Henrietta that I would later watch in Courtney Speed’s beauty parlor. When Curtis arrived in Baltimore with his assistants and cameras and microphones, Deborah thought everything would change, that she and the rest of the world would learn the true story of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells, and she would finally be able to move one. She started referring to periods in her life as “before London” and “after London.”

On page 273, “So on October 11, 1996, at Morehouse School of Medicine, he organized the first annual HeLa Cancer Control Symposium. He invited researchers from around the world to present scientific papers on cancer in minorities, and he petitioned the city of Atlanta to name October 11, the date of the conference, Henrietta Lacks Day. The city agreed and gave him an official proclamation from the mayor’s office.”

On page 292, “Deborah and I met on July 9, 2000, at a bed–and–breakfast on a cobblestone street corner near the harbor in Baltimore, in a neighborhood called Fell’s point. When she saw me standing in the lobby waiting for her, she pointed to her hair and said, “See this? I’m the gray child cause I’m the one doing all the worrying about our mother. That’s why I wouldn’t talk to you this last year. I swore I was never talkin to nobody about my mother again.” She sighed. “But here I am…I hope I don’t regret this.”

On page 293, “As a Ph.D student, he’d used HeLa to help develop something called fluorescence in situ hybridization, otherwise known as FISH, a technique for painting chromosomes with multicolored fluorescent dyes that shine bright under ultraviolet light. To the trained eye, FISH can uncover detailed information about a person’s DNA. To the untrained eye, it simply creates a beautiful mosaic of colored chromosomes.”

On page 297, “Deborah realized these movies were fiction, but for her the line between sci–fi and reality had blurred years earlier, when her father got the first call saying Henrietta’s cells were still alive. Deborah knew her mother’s cells had grown like the Blob until there were so many of them they could wrap around the Earth several times. It sounded crazy, but it was true.”

On page 298, “Deborah was full of oddly charming quirks. She carried a bottle of Lysol in her car that she would often spray at random, only half–joking. She sprayed directly in front of my nose several times when I sneezed, but mostly she sprayed it out the window when we stopped somewhere that looked particularly unsanitary, which happened often. She also gestured with her cane as she spoke, often tapping my shoulder with it to get my attention, or smacking it against my leg to emphasize a point.”

On page 306, “I think my birth was a miracle,” he said. “I believe that my mother waited to go to the doctor till after I was born because she wanted to have me. A child born like that, to a mother full of tumors and sick as she was, and I ain’t suffered no kinda physical harm from it? It’s possible all this is God’s handiwork.”

On page 307, “They lied to us for twenty–five years, kept them cells from us, then they gonna say them things donated by our mother. Them cells was stolen! Those fools come take blood from us sayin they need to run tests and not tell us that all these years they done profitized off of her? That’s like hanging a sign on our backs saying, ‘I’m a sucker, kick me in my butt.’ People don’t know we just as po’ as po.’ They probably think by what our mother cells had did that we well off. I hope George Grey burn into hell. If he wasn’t dead already, I’d take a black pitchfork and stick it up his ass.”

On page 309, “I think them cells is why I’m so mean,” he said. “I had to start fightin before I was even a person. That’s the only way I figure I kept them cancer cells from growin all over me while I was still inside my mother. I started fightin when I was just a baby in her womb, and I never known nothing different.”

On page 310, “Deborah cringed. “See,” she said, looking at me, “Everybody else never let him talk because he speak things the way he want to. I say let him talk, even if we be upset by what he’s sayin. He’s mad, gotta get it out, otherwise, he gonna keep on keeping it, and it’s gonna blow him right on up.”

“I’m sorry,” Zakariyya said. “Maybe her cells have done good for some people, but I woulda rather had my mother. If she hadn’t been sacrificed, I mighta growed up to be a lot better person than I am now.”

On page 314, “if the book ever got published, I would set up a scholarship fund for descendants of Henrietta Lacks. On Deborah’s good days, she was excited about the idea. “Education is everything,” she’d say. “If I’d had more of it, maybe this whole thing about my mother wouldn’t have been so hard. That’s why I’m always tellin Davon, ‘Keep on studyin, learnin all you can.’” But on bad days, she’d think I was lying and cut me off again.”

On page 320, “Truth be told, I can’t get mad at science, because it help people live, and I’d be a mess without it. I’m a walking drugstore! I can’t say nuthin bad about science but I won’t lie, I would like some health insurance so I don’t got to pay all that money every month for drugs my mother cells probably helped make.”

On page 331, “If those our mother’s cells,” he said, “how come they ain’t black even though she was black?”

“Under the microscope, cells don’t have a color,” Christoph told him. “They all look the same – they’re just clear until we put color on them with a dye. You can’t tell what color a person is from their cells.” He motioned for Zakarriya to come closer. “Would you like to look at them through the microscope? They look better there.”

On page 332, “They’re beautiful,” she whispered, then went back to staring at the slide in silence. Eventually, without looking away from the cells, she said, “God, I never thought I’d see my mother under a microscope – I never dreamed this day would ever come.”

On page 370, “When you plant a seed in the ground, it does not sprout to life unless it dies. And what you plant is a bare seed…not the full–bodied plant that will later grow up. God provides that seed with the body he wishes; he gives each seed its own proper body.”

“Henrietta was chosen,” Gary whispered. “And when the Lord chooses an angel to do his work, you never know what they going to come back looking like.”

On page 370 also, “There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, the beauty that belong to heavenly bodies is different from the beauty that belong to earthly bodies.”

“When Christoph projected Henrietta’s cells on the monitor in his lab a few days earlier, Deborah said, “They’re beautiful.” She was right. Beautiful and other worldly–glowing green and moving like water, calm and ethereal, looking precisely like heavenly bodies might look. They could even float through the air.

“I kept reading: “This is how it will be when the dead are raised to life. When the body is buried, it is mortal; when raised, it will be immortal. There is, of course, a physical body, so there has to be a spiritual body.”

On page 371, “In that moment, reading those passages, I understood completely how some of the Lackses could believe, without doubt, that Henrietta had been chosen by the Lord to become immortal being. If you believe the Bible is the literal truth, the immortality of Henrietta’s cells makes perfect sense. Of course, they were growing and surviving decades after her death, of course, they floated through the air, and of course they’d led to cures for diseases and been launched into space. Angels are like that. The Bible tells us so.”

On page 372, “ Jesus told his followers, “I give them eternal life, and they shall never die.” Plain, simple, to the point.”

On page 397 (afterword), “And at this point no case law has fully clarified whether you own or have the right to control you tissues. When they’re part of your body, they’re clearly yours. Once they’re excised, your rights get murky.”

On page 402 (afterword), “David Korn, vice provost for research at Harvard University, argues that giving patients control over their tissues is shortsighted. “Sure,” he says, “consent feels nice. Letting people decide what’s going to happen with their tissue seems like the right thing to do. But consent diminishes the value of tissue.” To illustrate this, Korn points to the Spanish flu pandemic. In the 1990s, scientists used stored tissue samples from a soldier who died in 1918 to re–create the virus’s genome and study why it was so deadly, with hopes of uncovering information about the current avian flu. In 1918, asking that soldier’s permission to take tissues for this kind of future research would have been impossible, Korn says.

“It was an inconceivable question – no one even knew what DNA was!”

“For Korn, the consent issue is overshadowed by a public responsibility to science: “I think people are morally obligated to allow their bits and pieces to be used to advance knowledge to help others. Since everybody benefits, everybody can accept the small risks of having their tissue scraps used in research.” The only exception he would make is for people whose religious belief prohibit tissue donation. “If somebody says being buried without all their pieces will condemn them to wandering forever because they can’t get salvation, that’s legitimate, and people should respect it,” Korn says. But he acknowledges that people can’t raise those objections if they don’t understand their tissues are being used in the first place.”

On page 404 (afterword), “It’s illegal to sell human organs and tissues for transplants or medical treatments, but it’s perfectly legal to give them away while charging fees for collecting and processing them.”

On page 405 (afterword), “Experts on both sides of the debate worry that compensating patients would lead to profit–seekers inhibiting science by insisting on unrealistic financial agreements or demanding money for tissues used in noncommercial or nonprofit research. But in the majority of cases, tissue donors haven’t gone after profits at all. They, like most tissue–rights activists, are less concerned about personal profits than about making sure the knowledge scientists gain by studying tissues is available to the public, and to other researchers. In fact, several patient groups have created their own tissue banks so they can control the use of their tissues and the patenting of discoveries related to them, and one woman became a patent holder on the disease gene discovered in her children’s tissues, which lets her determine what research is done on it and how it’s licensed.”

On page 405 (afterword), “Just as there is now law requiring informed consent for storing tissues for research, there is no clear requirement for telling donors when their tissues might result in profits. In 2006 an NIH researcher gave thousands of tissue samples to the pharmaceutical company +++++ in exchange for about half a million dollars. He was charged for violating a federal conflict of interest law, not because he failed to disclose his financial interest or the value of those tissue to the donors, but because federal researchers aren’t allowed to take money from pharmaceutical companies. His case resulted in a congressional investigation and later a hearing; the possible interests of the patients, and their lack of knowledge of the value of their samples, wasn’t mentioned at any point in the process.”

On page 413 (acknowledgement), “Deborah was the soul of this book – her spirit, her laughter, her pain, her determination, and her unbelievable strength were an inspiration that helped keep me working all these years. I feel deeply honored to have been part of her life.”