The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks makes you smarter and more compassionate by revealing the previously unknown story of a woman with extraordinary cells that still live today and have contributed to dozens of medical breakthroughs.

Henrietta was a poor black farmer who was born in Virginia in 1920. She married young and soon was a mother of five young children. She was 30 when she walked into the coloreds-only exam room at John’s Hopkins complaining of a lump on her cervix.

Doctors biopsied the lump, and a while later, the diagnosis came back as stage I cervical cancer. So she started receiving treatment, which at the time involved hours of excruciating exposure to radium. They left her badly burned and were sadly ineffective. She died later that year.

It was at this time that scientists were looking for ways to keep human cells alive outside the body to research diseases. George Gey discovered the roller-tube culturing technique that involved a rotating cylinder that kept the cells in motion.

When they put Henrietta’s cancer cells, or “HeLa,” in the roller-tube, they were amazed when it actually worked. Not only were they still alive, but they were doubling every 24 hours, faster than the human body.

The aggressive nature of the cancer cells enabled them to thrive and survive outside a body. Soon, Gey shared the news of his “immortal human cells,” making them an instant celebrity.

Though her cells were known and produced around the world, Henrietta and her family were largely forgotten. After her death, her family struggled to make ends meet. Her husband Day had to work two jobs, and her oldest son had to leave school to raise his younger siblings. The children never knew what happened to their mother, as their father wouldn’t talk about it. Many years later, her daughter got the story from the doctors who were on her case. Decades later, the family was finally able to learn about Henrietta’s condition and the contribution she had made to the field of medicine without even knowing. When writing the book, the author reached out to her family, but they were very reluctant to talk to her. Though she was finally able to talk to some of the family, getting information uphill battle because they didn’t trust her to tell the story. She learned they had a general mistrust in medicine because of the medical community’s past exploitation of black Americans. One example of this was the Tuskegee syphilis experiments of the 1930s, where scientists allowed uneducated poor black men to suffer from syphilis and go untreated so they could study the disease. Even though the history of the exploitation of black people by scientists…