The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Part 1

“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.”

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.

Then, a few days later, Jones got her biopsy results from the pathology lab: “Epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, Stage I.”

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.

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.”

And as Howard Jones once wrote, “Hopkins, with its large indigent black population, had no dearth of clinical material.”

It is far better for her to make her own adjustment before the operation than to awaken from the anesthetic and find it a fait accompli.

I’d also read about the lack of funding for research into sickle-cell anemia, a disease that affected blacks almost exclusively.

He lowered his voice and rattled off a list of dos and don’ts for dealing with Deborah Lacks: Don’t be aggressive. Do be honest. Don’t be clinical, don’t try 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.

When shipments were ready to go, Gey would warn recipients that the cells were about to “metastasize” to their cities, so they could stand ready to fetch the shipment and rush back to their labs.

Months later, Carrel won a Nobel Prize for his blood-vessel- suturing technique and his contributions to organ transplantation, and he became an instant celebrity.

Magazines called his culture medium “an elixir of youth” and claimed that bathing in it might make a person live forever.

Two and a half weeks later, Henrietta’s abdomen hurt, and she could barely urinate. The pain made it hard to walk. She went back to Hopkins, where a doctor passed a catheter to empty her bladder, then sent her home.

Soon after Emmett and his friends visited, at four o’clock on the afternoon of September 24, 1951, a doctor injected Henrietta with a heavy dose of morphine and wrote in her chart, “Discontinue all medications and treatments except analgesics.”