Module 3: "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot

Inside every nucleus within each cell in your body, there’s an identical copy of your entire genome.

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

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

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.

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.

Others mistook malignant changes for infection, sending women home with antibiotics only to have them return later, dying from metastasized cancer.

Others mistook malignant changes for infection, sending women home with antibiotics only to have them return later, dying from metastasized cancer.

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.”

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.

Salk would inoculate 2 million children and the NFIP would test their blood to see if they’d become immune.

Its walls were lined with industrial steel autoclaves for steam sterilizing; row upon row of enormous, mechanically stirred vats of culture medium; incubators; glass culturing bottles stacked on their sides; and automatic cell dispensers—tall contraptions with long, thin metal arms that squirted HeLa cells into one test tube after another.

Henrietta’s cells helped launch the fledgling field of virology, but that was just the beginning.

Without standardized materials and methods, they worried that the field of tissue culture would stagnate.

Five to ten days later, hard nodules began growing at the injection sites.

The press ran story after story about the brave men at the Ohio Penitentiary, praising them as “the first healthy human beings ever to agree to such rigorous cancer experiments.”

As he would say, “To use the dreaded word ‘cancer’ in connection with any clinical procedure on an ill person is potentially deleterious to that patient’s well-being, because it may suggest to him (rightly or wrongly) that his diagnosis is cancer or that his prognosis is poor....To withhold such emotionally disturbing but medically nonpertinent details...is in the best tradition of responsible clinical practice.”

Sixteen years earlier, on August 20, 1947, a U.S.-led war tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, had sentenced seven Nazi doctors to death by hanging.

He’d been giving himself and patients intravenous injections of vaccines made from HeLa cells, which he’d gotten from George Gey’s lab in such enormous quantities, they joked that instead of injecting them, Bjorklund could just fill a pool with HeLa—or maybe even a lake—and swim around in it for immunity.

Hyman compared Southam’s study to Nazi research and got affidavits from the three doctors who’d resigned—they described Southam’s research using words like illegal, immoral, and deplorable.

Hyman compared Southam’s study to Nazi research and got affidavits from the three doctors who’d resigned—they described Southam’s research using words like illegal, immoral, and deplorable.

The hospital called the suit “misleading and fallacious.”

In a scathing five-page document filled with exclamation points, he accused Southam and Mandel of fraud and unprofessional conduct, and demanded that the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York revoke their medical licenses.

Lefkowitz wrote, “Every human being has an inalienable right to determine what shall be done with his own body. These patients then had a right to know...the contents of the syringe: and if this knowledge was to cause fear and anxiety or make them frightened, they had a right to be fearful and frightened and thus say NO to the experiment.”

In a letter to the editor of Science, one of them warned, “When we are prevented from attempting seemingly innocuous studies of cancer behavior in humans...we may mark 1966 as the year in which all medical progress ceased.”

She exuded Don’t mess with me, her face stern and staring straight ahead.

“First I heard about it was, she had that cancer,” he said, repeating the story he’d told dozens of reporters over the years, almost verbatim.

Black corpses were routinely exhumed from graves for research, and an underground shipping industry kept schools in the North supplied with black bodies from the South for anatomy courses.

I direct you to provide accommodations for three or four hundred children of this class; you are also authorized to receive into this asylum, at your discretion, as belonging to such class, colored children who have lost one parent only, and in exceptional cases to receive colored children who are not orphans, but may be in such circumstances as to require the aid of charity.

In 1969, a Hopkins researcher used blood samples from more than 7,000 neighborhood children—most of them from poor black families—to look for a genetic predisposition to criminal behavior.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit claiming the study violated the boys’ civil rights and breached confidentiality of doctor-patient relationships by releasing results to state and juvenile courts.

The research was part of a study examining lead abatement methods, and all families involved were black.

According to Hsu, when she called Day in 1973, she told him this: “We come to draw blood to get HLA antigen, we do genetic marker profile because we can deduce a lot of Henrietta Lacks genotype from the children and the husband.”

Although this attitude wasn’t uncommon at the time, NIH guidelines stipulated that all human subject research funded by NIH—as McKusick’s was—required both informed consent and approval from a Hopkins review board.

They were in the process of being codified into law when Hsu called Day.

In the three months following Rogers’s story, Jet, Ebony, Smithsonian, and various newspapers published articles about Henrietta, “one of the pivotal figures in the crusade against cancer.”

Moore told another reporter, “It was very dehumanizing to be thought of as Mo, to be referred to as Mo in the medical records: ‘Saw Mo today.’ All of a sudden I was not the person Golde was putting his arm around, I was Mo, I was the cell line, like a piece of meat."

In the early 1970s a man named Ted Slavin had done precisely that with antibodies from his blood.

When Judge Joseph Wapner, most famous for being the judge on The People’s Court television show, ended up refereeing the depositions, Moore figured no one would take the case seriously.

That case set no precedent because it settled out of court, with rights to the cells being divided between the parties involved in the lawsuit, which didn’t include the cell “donor.”

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.

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 fiduciary duty, meaning Golde had taken advantage of his position as doctor and violated patient trust.

Christoph led us into a small laboratory crammed full of microscopes, pipettes, and containers with words like BIOHAZARD and DNA written on their sides.

And through that microscope, for that moment, all she could see was an ocean of her mother’s cells, stained an ethereal fluorescent green.