More to Life Than Cells

As Henrietta Lacks stepped out of her Buick and into Johns Hopkins Hospital, she knew what she was getting herself into. Or so she thought. The year was 1951, and Lacks had just discovered a “knot on [her] womb,” what the doctors at Hopkins later described as cervical cancer. Though her scientific knowledge was limited—she had dropped out of school in sixth grade and spent the majority of her life as a tobacco farmer in Clover, Virginia—Lacks knew she wanted these cancer cells removed and killed. What she didn’t know was that while she spent days in the hospital, lying with a tube of radium sewed to her cervix to kill these cancerous cells, some of them were untouched by the treatment. In fact, they were carefully being kept alive in a tissue culture lab at Hopkins.

Whether or not Henrietta would have been comfortable with this concept no one knows; no one thought to ask. She spent the remaining years of her life unaware that some of her cells—referred to as “HeLa” cells by scientists—were living a separate life outside her body. And that life was one of fame: by the time her family found out, HeLa cells had already been named the first immortal cell line, they had already been used to develop a vaccine for polio, they had already become the first human cells to be cloned, and they had already become the first successful animal-human hybrid cells when they were fused with mouse cells. As HeLa cells were being passed from lab to lab like currency, Henrietta’s children struggled to afford health insurance. When HeLa cells were found to have travelled to Russia and contaminated other cell lines, some of the Lacks family was still living near “Lacks Town,” the road along which the family had grown up.

In “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” Rebecca Skloot captures these two separate worlds, pulsing back and forth between them with each new chapter, weaving them closer together until they eventually collide. Although the book was published in 2010, Skloot conceived the idea when she was only sixteen years old. Her biology teacher had just taught the class the basics of cell division, and how it only takes one slight change in a protein to set the whole cycle off-balance, ultimately causing cancer. Almost as an afterthought, her instructor explained that these discoveries were made possible by studying a particular line of cancer cells: HeLa cells. Her instructor explained that although HeLa cells were the source of a wealth of medical knowledge, not much was known about their source. And just like that, Skloot’s curiosity was born. “Where was [Henrietta Lacks] from?” Skloot asked herself, as well as “Did she know how important her cells were [and] did she have any children?”